Drafting Priorities for Europeana Research

Part of the Europeana Cloud project involves the creation of Europeana Research.

Tying it with Europeana's broader strategy of seeing itself as a platform rather than simply a search portal, Europeana Research will be a way for digitally-minded researchers in the humanities and social sciences to exploit the data provided by Europe's museums, libraries and archives.

A team from the project (made up of staff from CERL, Europeana, Trinity College Dublin, The European Library and the Digital Curation Unit from Athens) met this week to go through some priorities for what Europeana Research should become.

They began sketching a wish list for features in Europeana Research, and discussed how it should differ from both the main Europeana search portal and Europeana Labs. There are many overlaps with the latter that need to be worked out. A preliminary list of desirable features for Europeana Research was produced.

Features such as the ability to download data, find relevant tools and (as ever) higher quality metadata were perceived as being important.

This work will be followed up by interviews with potential users and the creation of user scenarios. These will provide the guiding detail on the type of users that will utilise Europeana Research. A first version of the platform will be available at the end of November and work will continue on it as part of the Europeana Cloud project in 2015.