Europeana Annual Report and Accounts 2013 Published

Europeana’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2013 is published today. As always, we hold publication until the Foundation’s accounts have been externally audited and formally signed off to the satisfaction of the Board and the Commission. Now we can communicate how we did on our performance indicators and what our highlights were over the course of last year.

Download the Europeana Annual Report & Accounts 2013

The Report, called ‘Making Connections’ includes the stories of  the Europeana 1989 family history roadshows and the opening of our new Europeana 1914-1918 site. Now, in 2014, Europe is beginning the commemoration of the War’s centenary and the 25th anniversary of the revolution that brought down the Iron Curtain. Europeana has documented those two transforming events - the breakdown of Europe and its reunification – and made connections between the peoples of Europe and our common heritage.

The Report shows that we can collect the cultural heritage, from people themselves and from institutions, on a huge scale – 30 million items in the month we celebrated our fifth anniversary. The next question is can we find innovative ways to get it out to people? The Report shows the scale of the response when we put quantities of content on Wikimedia, Pinterest and Retronaut. It looks at how the search widget and the API are being used in a range of innovative contexts, including our own app, Europeana Open Culture.

Towards the end of last year and into this we have been very focused on our strategy for 2015-2020. Our visionary plans and our forward thinking are important, but we have to demonstrate that year by year we get the results. If we don’t prove that, then all our visions are mirages. The Annual Report for 2013 shows what a solid year’s work the Europeana teams achieved, and the good progress that was made.