Update on AllezCulture campaign
The #AllezCulture campaign, which we launched in May, is gathering evidence and support for Europeana's continued funding under the European Commission's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). We have now reached the end of the first phase of activity.
Thank you
Jill Cousins, Europeana Executive Director, says:
'Thank you for all of your tremendous and impressive efforts for the #AllezCulture campaign over the past couple of months. This has been hugely important in helping to persuade decision-makers in Brussels of the case for funding digital cultural heritage. Thank you also for the efforts that you have made to express support for and demonstrate the value of Europeana at a national level via your cultural and governmental institutions. Your efforts have had a real and direct impact in building support for our cultural heritage related projects and Europeana in the European Parliament and the European Council. As a result, we end this first phase of the #AllezCulture campaign with the European Commission recognising the value the cultural heritage and digital communities place on Europeana. This is an important achievement for our community and will be a great foundation for the work that still lies ahead of us after the summer break.'
Examples of support
The petition (titled 'Keep Europe’s culture open to everyone online') that we launched on 21 June closed with well over 7,500 signatures and hundreds of valuable and inspiring comments, including these examples:
From Jeremy Ottevanger: Europeana is the single most important international digital initiative for culture that I know of, both for what it does directly and what it enables. The waves it makes spread everywhere!
From Ulf Preuß: Wohin soll denn die Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek exportieren? Wie sieht es mit den ganzen Inhalten der Europeana Projekte aus? Was für eine bessere Möglichkeit zur europaweiten Präsentation einer gemeinsamen Idee gibt es denn sonst?
From Leboutte René: Europeana est un outil fondamental pour l'avenir intellectuel et culturel de l'Europe
Thank you for your efforts signing and sharing this petition. The strong response shows policy-makers in the EC that we are doing this together, that cultural heritage organisations across Europe need and want Europeana to continue, indeed that those organisations are Europeana.
Throughout the campaign, we've had support from a huge range of people, from Europe and beyond, including Dan Cohen of the Digital Public Library of America, who tweeted this to his 11,000+ followers: 'Voicing my strong support for continued funding for @EuropeanaEU, which has connected Europe & democratized access to culture. #AllezCulture'. See more #AllezCulture tweets.
Examples of the many organisations that have blogged on #AllezCulture include: the National Library of the Netherlands and EUscreen, who called Europeana the 'innovative hadron collider for the cultural sector'. See more blogs on the #AllezCulture Facebook group.
We have also had support from policy-makers themselves. Commissioner Neelie Kroes has tweeted five times about Europeana during the #AllezCulture campaign and this supportive video, made by the leader of the European Parliament's Culture Committee, Doris Pack, was shown to representatives of Member States at the Europeana conference in Dublin as part of the Irish Presidency.
Europeana Address by Doris Pack, EU Committee on Culture and Education from Europeana on Vimeo.
More examples of #AllezCulture activity can be found in our Storify feed.
Next steps
The Commission will now take time to gather and look at information on all of the Digital Infrastructure platforms that could potentially be funded, and to set out its process for the next stage of planning and decision-making in September.
After the summer, we will start phase two of our #AllezCulture campaign to influence this next stage. I hope that we can continue to count on the inspiring support that you have shown over the past few months.