Europeana Creative
Europeana Creative was a European project which enabled and promoted greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by creative industries.
The project was launched at the end of February 2013 at the Austrian National Library in Vienna and ran for 30 months. 26 partners from 14 European countries with diverse backgrounds contributed to the project. These included content providing institutions with world famous collections, creative industry hubs and organisations, the tourism and education sectors, living labs, software developers and multimedia experts, as well as think tanks.
The project set out to demonstrate that Europeana, which provides access to more than 30 million digitised cultural heritage objects from Europe's libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections, can facilitate the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage content and associated metadata. Partners developed a number of pilot applications focused on design, tourism, education and social networks. Building on these pilots, a series of open innovation challenges were launched with entrepreneurs from the creative industries to identify, incubate and spin-off more viable projects into the commercial sector.
The project goals were supported by an open laboratory network (the Europeana Labs), an on- and offline environment for experimentation with content, tools and business services, and a licensing framework where content holders can specify the re-use conditions for their material. The project was supported by continuous evaluation and business modelling development.
The re-use of digital content is an essential part of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Several activities are already stimulating the re-use of cultural heritage in order to demonstrate the social and economic value of cultural content. With the publication of the Europeana metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) in September 2012, further development of innovative applications based on this metadata is now possible. Europeana Creative took this a step further by facilitating re-use of the digital objects themselves.
Project partners
Austrian National Library, Austria
Europeana Foundation, The Netherlands
National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Kennisland, The Netherlands
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, The Netherlands
MFG Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg, Innovation Agency for ICT and Media Baden-Württemberg, Germany
European Business & Innovation Centre Network, Belgium
European Creative Business Network, The Netherlands
Platoniq Sistema Cultural, Spain
EUN Partnership / European Schoolnet, Belgium
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
Spild af Tid, Denmark
Shift (formerly We Are What We Do Community Interest Company), United Kingdom
Semantika, Slovenia
Webtic, The Netherlands
Ontotext, Bulgaria
Exozet Games, Germany
Agence luxembourgeoise d'action culturelle, Luxembourg
Culture24, United Kingdom
EUROCLIO – European Association of History Educators, The Netherlands
Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland
National Museum, Czech Republic
Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung, Germany
The British Library, United Kingdom
European Network of Living Labs, Belgium
Ramulus Ltd., United Kingdom