Europeana: A digital gateway to Europe’s cultural heritage on data.europa.eu

A recent addition of datasets to data.europa.eu is from Europeana, a flagship EU initiative that supports the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. The objective of Europeana is to unite cultural heritage professionals from all domains across Europe. It provides open access to over 55 million digital objects - books, music, artworks and more, with sophisticated search and filter tools, themed collections, exhibitions, galleries, and blogs to enhance user experience.

A network of aggregators, including Archives Portal Europe, Czech Digital Library, and many others, share cultural heritage, national and regional data with Europeana. Over 4,000 cultural heritage institutions are part of this network, gathering authentic, trustworthy, and robust data and making it accessible through the portal. These aggregators are members of the Europeana Aggregators' Forum (EAF), a network of national, regional, domain and thematic aggregators who exchange knowledge on aggregation and data sharing.  The aggregated data can be viewed, shared, used, and reused to bring content from institutions across Europe to new audiences. This is achieved by developing for example engaging stories, awareness campaigns, or remix competitions.

On data.europa.eu you can find Europeana’s dataset catalogue, consisting of metadata descriptions of cultural heritage digital objects from and about Europe. Those datasets can be reused in various cases, such as education, games, design, scientific research and much more. For example, one of the Europeana's APIs, SPARQL, allows users to explore connections between Europeana data and outside data sources such as VIAF, Iconclass, Geonames, Wikidata and DBPedia.

Are you interested in searching for Europeana datasets? Find them here on data.europa.eu.

For more news and events, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or subscribe to our newsletter.