Europeana Collections brings you closer to culture

As you’ll have seen if you’ve taken a look at Europeana recently, our new website is now live. It has a new name - Europeana Collections - and really helps our audiences to get up, close and personal with the vast and amazing digitized collections of Europe’s cultural heritage institutions.

Many of you have been exploring and testing the alpha version of Europeana Collections over the last few months. Thanks for all the feedback you’ve given us along the way. We hope that you like the new version - initial tweets and emails suggest you do!

Bruno Racine, President of the Europeana Foundation and the National Library of France, tells us why he’s pleased with Europeana Collections:

“Europeana Collections gives everyone access to tens of millions of cultural items and artefacts and the new site presents in dazzling detail those given to us in high quality by our 3,500 partners. Nearly 3 million of our higher quality items are also openly licensed, which means people can use them for their own purposes. The range of this open material is breathtaking - from the unique and iconic like a painting by Edvard Munch, or handwritten notes and diagrams by Leonardo Da Vinci, to the unexpected like an allegorical and plundered painting of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II or a personal account of the First World War.”

So what will you find when you visit Europeana now?

For starters, its fresh, clean feel, designed in response to feedback from yourselves, other stakeholders and of course, our audiences, makes it easy to navigate.

Improved search and filters, including innovative colour searches (try this one for ‘Dark slate blue’) and quality searches (find our very best maps of Paris), mean finding what you’re looking for is simple.

Better, bigger previews, a zoom function for high resolution images and documents (get really close up to this Monet), direct play for video (try this silent film) and audio (listen to this Maria Callas aria) and a new download option mean less time clicking and more time engrossed in cultural content.

Clear copyright information shows you what you can and can’t do with the treasures you find.

All this together gives you trustworthy and relevant information and content to use, to learn, to share or to contribute to research.

See for yourself with our quick demo - use the on-screen options to share it on social media.

The name is new too - ‘Europeana Collections’ lets visitors know that Europeana brings digital culture from diverse sources across Europe together.

Also new for 2016 are curated collections on popular interest topics. Europeana Music Collections and Europeana Art History Collections are available as test versions now and will launch officially in early 2016, with other themes including fashion and newspapers to follow. Please let us know what you think using the ‘Give us your input’ link you’ll find on-screen.

On that note, please help us spread the word that Europeana is now better than ever. Explore the site, discover new things and use your social media and other networks to tell others about it. Thanks!