Introducing Europeana Network Association’s 2019-2021 Management Board

First, let me thank all who voted on behalf of the six new Board Members for the trust placed in us to manage and lead the Europeana Network Association (ENA) over the next two years. We value the opportunity to be elected on this Board and we are proud to represent over 2300 members and their interests. On 20 February 2019, we met in Leiden for the first time as the new Board. During this meeting, I was appointed as Chair, and as such I will manage the Board, channel all the voices that can be heard in the ENA, and Chair the meetings of the Board, Members Council, and the General Assembly. Georgia will be an invaluable sparring partner for me, as she was appointed as Vice-Chair, and she will replace me where needed. At the same meeting, Fred was appointed as Treasurer to oversee the ENA budget.

All six of us have been years-long enthusiastic ambassadors of Europeana and the ENA, and we are highly motivated to lead the development of its strategic vision, while also representing it on the Europeana Foundation Governing Board. We work together to oversee the ENA governance, to set the procedures, annual policy, budget and delivery of formal reports. We accept new members to the ENA and provide guidance to the ENA Communities, their Task Forces and Working Groups, and formally approve and evaluate their work progress.

Our aspirations and approach

We see Europeana and ENA as a wonderful vehicle to put our professional values and beliefs into practice. We aim to engage our members in a positive-minded community and make them feel proud of being a part of ENA - an influential community and ever-increasing movement of thousands of people in Europe and beyond to promote digital culture and digital cultural heritage as powerful agents in an ever-changing world.

In our first meeting, we already briefly discussed the strategic direction for ENA over the next two years. The ENA has shown great potential in its European-level cross-domain composition, thought-leadership and innovation capacity particularly in the case of EuropeanaTech, Copyright and Impact community activities. We are also enthusiastic and foresee a lot of opportunities in the field of research, education, and communications.

We would like to build on these strengths and increase inclusiveness and engagement of our members, strengthen the communities, and embed more projects in the ENA. Together with the Europeana Foundation and Aggregator Forum, we will work towards the  overall strengthening of the Europeana initiative. At the upcoming Members Council meeting from 5-6 March in The Hague (the first of 2019), where we will welcome 19 new Councillors, we will discuss the best ways to do so and also what our concrete next steps should be to achieve these goals. You will hear more about this in upcoming posts here on Pro News.

Thanking our predecessors

Finally, I would like to thank Merete Sanderhoff, Max Kaiser, Joke van der Leeuw-Roord, Paul Keller, Johan Oomen, and Uldis Zariņš as our former Board members, who joined us in the meeting in Leiden to share their impressions, lessons learned and advice based on four years of experience on the Board. They did an outstanding job and made an extraordinary effort to kickstart the ENA and manage its growth to where we are today. They also laid the foundations for the six ENA communities and it is because of their commitment and hard work that  we can now focus on the further development of these communities, which are at the heart of ENA. As they will remain involved with Europeana in one way or the other, we are all able to keep on benefiting from their expertise. We very much look forward to that!