Europeana V1.0

The core tasks it achieved were:

• Transformed the Europeana prototype into an operational service
• Developed new features like the timeline, automatic translation and Wikipedia display
• Improved functionality such as better search ranking and ways to refine results, including the ability to filter on the rights field to see only public domain content
• Increased the content accessible through Europeana, bringing the total up to 20 million objects with much better representation across Europe.

To sustain this knowledge-sharing network of over 200 partners beyond the life of the project, the Council of Content Providers and Aggregators (CCPA) was founded. The CCPA is now part of the governanace structure of Europeana, and provides a forum for issues that affect content providers.

The v1.0 project also developed a long term strategy for Europeana. Although the next phase, version 2.0, is again project funded, Europeana must be seen as a business with a long term future. The Strategic Plan 2011-2015 will focus resources on developing 4 tracks that began in v1.0:

• Aggregate: sourcing content from across Europe, and fostering a network of aggregators working either at national level (Hispana; Culture Grid) or domain level (European Film Gateway).
• Facilitate: sharing knowledge among cultural heritage professionals through publications, workshops and conferences, and fostering research and development through events like our hackathons.
• Distribute: making their heritage available to users as and when they want it, using, for example, the Europeana API and search widget
• Engage: enabling users to interact with their heritage in new ways, including bringing in user-generated content as the initiative The First World War in Everyday Documents (Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten) has done.