Portal to platform and other priorities in Europeana Business Plan 2014
Today we published our annual business plan. This plan guides our day-to-day work at the Europeana office, and is based on extensive input from our community. Harry Verwayen, Europeana´s Business Development Director answers questions about it:
How do you decide what ends up in the Europeana Business Plan, and what does not?
A lot of the work that we do is part of the various projects we are involved in. So this is already committed to in the descriptions of work. This business plan is largely based on the nine projects that the Europeana Foundation either leads (Europeana Version 2, Europeana Version 3 and Europeana Awareness) or is a partner in (Europeana Creative, Europeana Cloud, Europeana Food & Drink, Europeana Inside, Apps 4 Europe and Europeana Sounds). Within this framework, we then identify synergies and allocate the work to our internal teams. You will see for example that both Europeana Creative and Europeana Food & Drink need a technical infrastructure to surface re-usable content for the creative industries. Developing this infrastructure is therefore a primary focus of our product development team this year.
How do you define what the priorities are for the year?
With all the commitments, milestones and deliverables that we all need to produce, it is essential to define guiding principles to establish what the priorities are so that we actually deliver value for our partners, instead of just ‘ticking the boxes’. Besides the nine projects in which we are active partners, there are a number of other projects, such as Europeana Space and Europeana Photography who contribute greatly to our ambitions to make as much heritage as possible available and re-usable. So of course we want to accommodate them. Each year, we do an extensive consultation with our network to establish these priorities. This year is a bit special because we are also developing our long-term strategy in parallel with the business plan (which covers one calendar year). We organised a total of 6 workshops where we asked our members what they would like to see addressed.
Four priorities
The consultation led to a number of clear priorities that we believe Europeana should focus on:
1. Shift from portal to platform
Tim Sherrat from Trove has expressed the difference between the two very well: ‘Portals are for visiting, platforms are for building upon’. We want Europeana to be much more than a place for people to view what has happened in the past. We want them to find the stuff they are interested in, and be inspired to share it with their friends, perhaps add information to it and, who knows, build an app! (Check this recent one that connects trending topics on social media with trends from the past, which we came across recently during a Facebook hackathon in Berlin.) This year, we will start making that shift by developing clear value propositions for the 3 market segments that Europeana will cater to.
2. Focus on quality
Changing the way we distribute our heritage is of course directly related to the quality of the material we make available. While we continue to collect all the material that partners make available, we will focus strongly on improving the quality of that data, which will in turn improve its re-use and discoverability potential wherever the cultural heritage institution wishes to expose their data. We aim for all data in Europeana to have relevant descriptions, previews of reasonable sizes, accurate geo-location data, clear and correct rights statements (preferably to allow re-use) and persistent direct links to the objects themselves.
3. Value for partners
We are very aware that our partners have invested heavily over the years to make their holding available through Europeana. That is not an easy task. We want to make sure that all partners feel their relationship with Europeana is worthwhile. We will therefore continue to increase the visibility of the data and content in every imaginable place. Last year, we were able to generate over 31 million impressions on the portal, social media and increasingly on sites such as Pinterest and Wikipedia. We intend to do better this year.
4. Become a fully networked organisation
Over the past four years, Europeana has developed from a project to a network organisation. This includes over 800 members of the Europeana Network, more than 2,300 content-contributing partners, a Europeana Tech community of over 75, some 25 EU-funded projects, a Board of 20 European associations of content holders, a Member State Expert Group representing all the EU Member States and an office of 50 full-time employees. Together we believe that we can power the world with European culture, and that this is vitally important because culture has the ability to transform lives. This year we will get together to discuss the things that matter to us during a number of very promising events such as the Annual General Meeting at the Prado in Madrid in October and the Europeana Tech event at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris in December . We look forward to seeing you there and wish you a fantastic and successful year!
