On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, on 8 May 2023 the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek presented the results of the project User-oriented Restructuring of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek at a ceremony in the James-Simon-Galerie in Berlin. Harry Verwayen, General Director of the Europeana Foundation delivered a keynote address on this special occasion.
Other contributors to the ceremony included the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media Claudia Roth and imminent figures from key German cultural institutions including the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, to name but a few. Here’s a glimpse of what happened.
Looking back at a decade of partnership
Germany has been a key Europeana supporter of the Europeana Initiative since its establishment 15 years ago. In 2005, together with five other EU Member States, Germany urged the European Commission to create a publicly-funded counterpart to the then-new Google Library project, giving birth to the Europeana Initiative. Germany has steadily supported our work ever since, consistently featuring among the top contributors to Europeana’s infrastructure both in terms of quantity and quality, with over 6 million objects from more than 200 institutions available through the Europeana website. We are grateful for the contribution and commitment of the more than 250 members of the Europeana Network Association based in Germany.
As our main partner in Germany and as an Europeana accredited national aggregator since 2012, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek has played a leading role in this process. 10 years ago, the Europeana Initiative accompanied the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek in the launch of the first public beta version of its portal. This paved the way for bringing all of Germany’s cultural and scientific institutions and their digitised inventories closer together, and for their integration into Europeana.
In his keynote address, our General Director Harry Verwayen, highlighted, ‘Opening-up their local, regional and national collections to Europe enabled German cultural institutions to make a significant and concrete contribution to the European project: one with our shared culture at its heart. One decade later, we are proud to celebrate the relaunch of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek portal, centred even more on people, fostering more participation, and designed with the principles of open access right at its core.’
