Europeana reaches 20 million items
Photo of Claudia Schmied, Austrian Minister of Culture and Sabine Haag, Director General of the Kunsthistorisches Museum alongside Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath.(c) KHM"Providing a huge amount of diverse cultural heritage data is key for Europeana's success," said Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana. "Kulturpool as the national cross-domain aggregator for Austria plays an important part by leveraging its technology to sustainably support the growth of Europeana."
Kulturpool – initiated and funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK), and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research (BMWF) -enables the site's visitors to call up vast collections of art work, documents and other photographed or scanned items. Kulturpool acts as an Austrian cross-domain aggregator for digital cultural heritage to Europeana and makes Austrian cultural heritage accessible on a pan-European level.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum's collection comprises paintings and art works from different ages. Founded in 1891, the museum focuses chiefly on the art of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Caravaggio's 'David mit dem Haupt des Goliath,' painted in 1600/01, is among its masterpieces
"We are pleased to provide the Kunsthistorisches Museum's collection as part of the digital culture portal Europeana, which makes the European cultural heritage accessible to the worldwide public," said Dr. Sabine Haag, general director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. "Caravaggio's painting of David ideally symbolizes the goals of Europeana, given the painting's history. After its completion, the painting was part of a collection in Italy, then an English collection, and later also in the Netherlands, before it landed in the collection of imperial Austria in 1667, which later became the collection of the federal Austrian museum."
The uma team has worked for several years to create a Web 2.0 semantic platform that combines the rich knowledge repositories of Kulturpool's museum partners – for example Albertina, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien and Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Targeted user groups of the Kulturpool include the interested public, as well as students, teachers, the scientific community and the participating cultural institutions themselves. Also the Kulturpool provides research and collaboration tools as well as special support tools for educators to develop and share learning resources.
Currently, more than 380,000 objects are available through the Kulturpool, which is constantly expanding.
View the press release in German
About Europeana
Europeana brings together the digitized content of Europe's libraries, galleries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently, Europeana provides integrated access to 20 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 29 European languages. Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.
The cultural content of European can be explored at www.europeana.eu.
Europeana is funded not only to engage audiences with digitized cultural content but also to facilitate innovation in the cultural heritage sector, supporting open licensing of data and piloting linked open data initiatives and apps development. For more information about Europeana visit the Europeana Professional website at: http://pro.europeana.eu/
About uma - separating the signal from the noise
Since its founding in 1994, uma has been thinking about new forms of complex knowledge retrieval and spatial user experiences. Within this domain, uma has continuously built a reputation as an innovation leader, demonstrated through various awards and international recognitions during the last decade. uma provides end-to-end services for its customers, helping with creative planning as well as the implementation and integration on the basis of Melvil©, a semantic service platform, the SKIN™ and VICO™ Multitouch Solutions and MelvilMediaMood®, a semantic social and analog Media Monitoring Solution.
uma clients include the OTTO Group, Republic of Austria, Siemens, Intel, IBM, Intersport, Deutsche Telekom AG, 3, Verbund AG, Red Bull or L'Oréal. uma is headquartered in Vienna, Austria. For more information, please visit www.uma.at
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NOTE: If you would like screenshots of Caravaggio's painting of David, screenshots of Kulturpool, or screenshots of uma Melvil, please contact Chris Pfaff on +1-201-218-0262 or chris@chrispfafftechmedia.com