Europeana Sounds

The Europeana Sounds project, led by the British Library, ran from February 2014 to January 2017 and became the domain aggregator for audio and audio-related material. Europeana Sounds is hosted by the British Library, supported by the Europeana Sounds Task Force. Europeana Music, which was developed as part of the Europeana Sounds project, is also curated by the British Library. Europeana Sounds therefore also aggregates collections with music-related content, such as music manuscripts, printed music, photographs of musicians, etc. Europeana Sounds has over 530,000 records on Europeana, corresponding to around 618,000 audio recordings and 312,000 audio-related objects. Currently 20 archives contribute to Europeana through Europeana Sounds.

In addition to data publication Europeana Sounds offers:

• Advice on type of material that can be aggregated
• Access to and maintenance of the mapping software, MINT, offered free to Europeana Sounds data providers
• One to one training (which can be provided remotely) in the operation of MINT software, setting up an account, uploading and mapping of data,
• Best practice for data quality,
• Technical advice on audio-visual material,
• Advice on copyright and licensing
• Yearly one day training workshop held at the British Library,
• Metadata conversion and enrichment with MINT,
• For small, standalone collections, Europeana Sounds can map metadata to EDM format and publish on Europeana.

Technical conditions for working with Europeana Sounds:

• Metadata must be available in XML or CSV for upload or for harvesting through OAI-PMH,
• Europeana Sounds encourages data providers to transform their data to EDM format using MINT; however, it will also accept native metadata and map it to the EDM Sounds schema and from there to EDM.
• Digital media (audio, images, text, video) must be published online and made available via a direct link.
• Audio can be either downloadable or embeddable.
• The rights to the content must be cleared to be freely accessible worldwide and all content clearly rights labelled.

Limitations: None

Financial conditions: None