Europeana Sounds

Europeana Sounds is Europeana's 'missing' fifth domain aggregator, joining APEX (Archives), EUscreen (television), the Europeana Film Gateway (film) and TEL (libraries).

The project will:

• increase the opportunities for access to and creative re-use of Europeana's audio and audio-related content
• build a sustainable best practice network of stakeholders to aggregate, enrich and share a critical mass of audio for public audiences, the creative industries (notably publishers) and researchers.

The consortium of 24 partners from 12 countries will:

• Double the number of audio items accessible through Europeana to over 1 million and improve geographical and thematic coverage by aggregating items with widespread popular appeal such as contemporary and classical music, traditional and folk music, the natural world, oral memory, and languages and dialects.
• Enrich metadata for 2 million items in Europeana's audio and audio-related collections, developing techniques for cross-media and cross-collection linking.
• Develop and validate audience-specific sound channels and a distributed crowdsourcing infrastructure for end-users that will improve Europeana's search facility, navigation, and user experience.
• Engage music publishers and rights-holders in efforts to make more material accessible online through Europeana by resolving domain constraints and lack of access to commercially unviable (i.e. out-of-commerce) content.
• These outcomes will be achieved through a network of leading sound archives working with specialists in audiovisual technology, rights issues, and software development. The network will expand to include other content-providers and mainstream distribution platforms (Historypin, Spotify, Soundcloud) to ensure widest possible availability of their content.