Europeana Cloud at Heart of Europeana Strategy
Europeana recently released its strategic plan for 2015-2020. It describes how the new technical infrastructure being built by Europeana Cloud is a key part of Europeana's upcoming work.
"In the next couple of years, we hope to completely transform the aggregation process by building on our cloud infrastructure," says Europeana.
The use of Europeana Cloud for the ecosystem of aggregators and data providers is forseen as a staged process
Stage 1 shows the end of the Europeana Cloud Project. Three aggregators will be using the Cloud infrastructure: The European Library, Europeana and the Polish Digital Library Federation. These are the three aggregators who are currently building the infrastructure and will be migrating to it during the course of the project.
Stage 2, in 2018, shows key aggregators within the Europeana eco-system making use of Europeana Cloud. Europeana will be contacting these aggregators as part of the project to find out how they might best use a shared inifrastructure such as Cloud.
Stage 3, in 2020, shows data providers to Europeana starting to use the Cloud.
In the long run, this new infrastructure is key to Europeana's plans to sharply increase its number of contributing partners: from 2,500 currently to 25,000 by 2020. Europeana will also use the Cloud infrastructure as a way to encourage partners to invest in Europeana itself.
"On the ‘supply’ side, to sustain ourselves in the future, we invite partners to become investors; co-owners of Europeana. As this is not cost effective, or indeed fair, on an individual institution basis we will seek these strategic investment partnerships at the Member State level. These investors will get access to premium services in the Europeana Cloud that allow them to move quickly from their legacy systems, share their data and content in ways that will improve the reach, data quality, and efficiency for institutions."