Europeana Generic Services: Opportunity to fund a Thematic Collection

Linked to Europeana’s funding under CEF, the European Commission published on Tuesday 20th, September 2016 a public call for Generic Services to create thematic collections using Europeana’s Core Service Platform.

We would very much like the Europeana Network to take advantage of this funding and would love to support good ideas for new thematic collections on Europeana that help users get to the rich material held in our cultural heritage institutions. The big bonus of this call is that it will support digitisation of specific collections that are needed for the thematic collection.

Two million euros (funding is at 50% of total costs) have been set aside for ‘projects that select outstanding artefacts and works of art that show the development of cultural movements of European significance’. Good current examples are Europeana Music and Europeana Art, but expanding these to attract new users, using the expertise that exists in the Europeana Network would be a wonderful way to showcase Europe’s rich cultural heritage. This can mean anything; for example, in areas of content strength such as literature, poetry, religion, folklore, maps and cartography or science and technology or themes where there is considerable pan-European interest such as migration or World War II.

Using Europeana’s tools and standards to develop thematic collections, the projects should take visitors on a curated journey through the heritage about these movements. The intention is that the new thematic collection will be a means for showing objects already on Europeana in a new way, combined with newly digitised material (in high-quality, of course) from the collections of Europe’s cultural heritage institutions, either already connected to Europeana or not.

This Generic Services-call is a good opportunity for a consortium of cultural heritage institutions to develop a thematic collection on a shared, common, topic. The call requires at least three partners from at least three different European member states and compliance to our policy for developing and operating new thematic collections and a product specification for thematic collections are available on Europeana Pro.

Please contact us with your brilliant ideas so we can help turn them into new thematic collections. Deadline for submission (to the European Commission) is 15 December 2016.