Music heritage resources for the Europeana Challenge

Europe is steeped with musical heritage and this diversity is well reflected on Europeana. Increasingly items are being made available with open licenses and direct access to media files, and new features in the Europeana Collections website and Europeana API allow users to quickly find high quality content for their projects.

Here we will explain the different ways that you can explore, uncover and access these materials.

Europeana Collections

The recently relaunched Europeana Collections website is a searchable, visual interface to the complete collection of nearly 50 million records. Browsing through individual items you can, where available, manually download original media files. A good place to start is the Europeana Music Collection which provides access to over 270,000 items, including images, text, video and of course sounds, representing nearly every European country (plus a few more from further afield). You'll also find thematic exhibitions and curated collections.

Here are some further Collections links and tips to help you:

On the left hand side of any search results page you will see extra filters that allow you to refine your search

• First you will want to select an appropriate license - for most creative projects it's best to choose the option "Can I use it? Yes - with attribution" which will only contain re-usable content that can be used commercially and be modified.
• Then you may want to choose a content type, such as just sounds.
• At this point more content-specific options appear, such as filtering by sound quality or duration. For example the Music Collection contains over 1,200 items with direct links to audio files with a duration of 3 minutes or more.
• Of course you can also combine these with standard text searches, such as looking for a specific composer (such as Richard Strauss), or from a particular provider (such as the Irish Traditional Music Archive)

Europeana Labs

On Europeana Labs we have a showcase of apps and creations that have been made with Europeana content. There's a special audiovisual category that contains some inspirational creations.

Europeana API

The Europeana API provides direct access for developers to the complete data available through Europeana. This allows the creation of powerful, content rich apps and services. Indeed our own website runs on the API, and all the search methods mentioned above and in use on the Collections website are available as API paramaters.

Example queries

• Openly licensed content - &reusability=open
• Limit to items with HD audio files - &qf=SOUND_HQ:true
• People searches e.g. artists - &qf=who:Richard+Strauss
• Limit searches to a specific provider or collection (e.g. British Library) - &qf=europeana_collectionName%3A9200251_Ag_EU_TEL_a1200a_British_Library*
• to replicate the wider subject-based filter used for the Music Collection see the Music dataset page

Find out more

• Read more about the API in our extensive API documentation
• Learn how to use the new media metadata methods to restrict searches to items with directly available media files such as images and audio; also to search by quality, colour, and a whole lot more!
• See how to ensure that you use content that is correctly licensed for your product
• Data is also available via a SPARQL endpoint and OAI-PMH.

Need help?

Full details for the entry criteria to the 1st Europeana Challenge can be found on the Challenge page.

If you have any questions or are seeking particular content, please email [email protected]