Europeana Inside: Culture is a Right

Nick Poole, chair of the Europeana Network, and CEO of Collections Trust, recently addressed the Europeana Inside partners meeting via video. In this inspiring address, he explains the vision of Europeana Inside, its transformational potential for all cultural institutions and how it motivates him.

'I've been living with this idea for nearly ten years now. It is fantastic to see it coming to fruition,' says Nick. 'It's a very simple idea. It's also a very powerful idea. Culture is a right, it's a fundamental right that every child is born with - the right to access, to enjoy, to be amazed by, to learn from and to discover the cultures that went before them that created the society that they're in today. It's a right that's at risk of being eroded in the digital age as our sector struggles to make the transition from physical to digital.'

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Nick goes on to say that Europeana Inside is a project that at heart is about the 'digital transformation of the culture sector.' He says that the project has two key advantages that will help to overcome the technology, copyright and cost barriers to transformation. First, it has 'a network of people that have immense technical knowledge' and who have a 'real understanding of how to build systems that are fluid, responsive, agile.' And second, the project has the capability to reach nearly 20,000 institutions across Europe.

The primary objective of Europeana Inside is to support the Digital Agenda for Europe by achieving a lasting transformation in the quantity, scope and usability of the content available to Europeana from European cultural institutions by reducing or removing the operational, legal, technical and financial barriers to participation. It will lead to a specific increase in content to Europeana of more than 960,000 new records from 15 cultural institutions and 5 national and thematic aggregators in the EU. It will also open up the potential for more than 7,000 other cultural institutions to deliver content to Europeana simply and easily in the future – a potential contribution of more than 30 million new records.

Nick continues, 'We need to make Europeana Inside as invisible, as comfortable, as opaque as possible to even the most non-technical of users. Put simply, opening up your collections to future generations has to become as simple as pressing a button.'

With the capability to reach so many institutions across Europe, Europeana Inside is about 'taking a great leap forward, doing something genuinely transformative to enable access to culture for current and for future generations.'

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