Three horizons of innovation in ‘Europeana Foundation Business Plan 2019: Our common culture’

The Europeana Foundation is an independently governed organisation with a mission to ‘transform the world with culture’. The Europeana Core Service is governed by the European Commission and the Member States and funded under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) of the European Union. We work very closely with the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum and the Europeana Network Association to develop a strong public service that supports cultural heritage institutions in their digital transformation.  

The Europeana Foundation Business Plan 2019, subtitled ‘Our common culture’, demonstrates how our combined contribution to that mission this year will be to improve the quality of the Europeana Core Service, to find ways to extend that service and to innovate for the sector at large.

Concentrating on the Core Service

We will further improve Europeana Collections and the APIs to allow Europe’s cultural heritage to reach even more teachers, researchers and cultural enthusiasts. Our aim? 500,000 visits to Europeana Collections each month.

We will further develop the back-end service infrastructure (Metis) to allow us to work better with the national and domain aggregators who make the cultural heritage objects available.

We will support cultural heritage institutions to share higher quality content and metadata, and work with them to develop shared standards and practices through workshops, conferences and our professional information site, Europeana Pro.

Look out for: Three new thematic collections, two Europeana reuse challenges and one new-look, more accessible Europeana Pro!

Extending the Core Service

With a consolidated Core Service, we can look to strategically extend our offering in exciting and innovative directions - from improving the aggregation landscape to finding new ways of presenting and working with cultural heritage material.

A new project - Europeana Common Culture - will see 24 partners come together to improve the functioning of the network of Europeana’s national aggregators by harmonising policies, experimenting with novel technologies and supporting emerging national aggregators in their development.

Two participatory projects (EnrichEuropeana and CrowdHeritage) will provide the public with opportunities to get hands-on by transcribing and annotating cultural heritage material.

Look out for: Increased support for a range of media - a new Europeana media player will be integrated into Europeana Collections and a Task Force will provide guidance on publishing 3D objects online.

Innovating for the sector

To support innovation in the cultural heritage sector, the Europeana Foundation, with partner Sound and Vision, has developed an innovation agenda. This agenda will guide our decisions on participating in new projects, pilots or other activities outside of the Core Services, with all work supporting the sector’s digital transformation.

Time Machine, a large-scale research infrastructure now beginning its preparatory phase, will aim to use artificial intelligence for the mass digitisation and interpretation of collections and to create completely new ways to interact with that data.

V4Design will bring digitised cultural heritage assets directly into the tools used by architects and video game designers.

And GIFT will explore how artists, designers, museum professionals and computer scientists can help museums create personal encounters with cultural heritage, both in physical and digital realms.

Look out for: Three workshops on the potential impact of Time Machine on areas such as education, scholarship and urban planning.

What’s more…

None of this happens without investing in our people and partnerships.

We have a programme of meetings for the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum and the Europeana Network Association’s Members Council, as well as a two-day conference for the Network at large. And we continue our EU Member States engagement with stakeholder meetings under the Romanian and Finnish presidencies of the council of the European Union.

In the office, we want to invest in staff development, reduce the burden of reporting, and encourage our employees to go greener.

Look out for: More women on conference panels as the Europeana Foundation supports the No Women No Panel Campaign initiated by Commissioner Mariya Gabriel.

Download the 'Europeana Foundation Business Plan 2019: Our common culture' now! Choose between a web-friendly or printer-friendly version.