Technical requirements

Whether you provide data to Europeana directly as a data provider or indirectly via an aggregator, certain basic technical requirements must be fulfilled:

Your metadata must conform to the Europeana Semantic Elements, a Dublin Core-based set of fields with 12 additional Europeana-specific elements, which are necessary for records to display correctly in Europeana. Aggregators develop tools with which they can help providers to map their metadata to the Europeana Semantic Elements.

Persistent identifier: Europeana links from the metadata in our index to the digital object on your website, therefore you must provide a persistent URL: a web location that never changes. This means that users of Europeana can always connect to the digital object on your website.

OAI-PMH: The Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is our preferred method of capturing your metadata; therefore you will need to have OAI-PMH implemented in your system. As an alternative, you can place your metadata on an FTP server from which we can manage it.

Moving from ESE to EDM

ESE is a subset of the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and can therefore be mapped directly to it. Europeana will make ESE records compliant with EDM by using a default mapping. Therefore providers who have submitted data in ESE formats do not need to do anything more. Providers are free to examine the results of the mapping in the portal and provide a better mapping if they wish to do so. There are three possibilities of how to do this: providers can either accept the default mapping; create a new ESE V3.4.1 Mapping; or create a full or minimal mapping to EDM. Further details are available in the EDM documentation section.