Activity period: June 2008 – May 2011 Project website: http://www.europeanalocal.eu/

See:

• News related to the project
• Publications related to the project in the PSNC Digital Libraries Team repository

Description:
EuropeanaLocal will establish a Best Practice Network which will, over three years, improve the interoperability of the digital content held by regional and local institutions and make it accessible through the Europeana service of the European Digital Library and to other services. There is a pressing need to involve Europe’s network of local and regional libraries, museums and archives more extensively in making the enormous amount of digital content that they hold available through Europeana. Such involvement will bring together a rich diversity of content of all types, cultures and languages making it possible to establish integrated services with great richness and adding value for communities and individual users.

EuropeanaLocal will work with the EDL Foundation to establish efficient and sustainable processes through which local and regional institutions can easily make their content available to Europeana during and after the project, adopting and promoting the use of its infrastructures, tools and standards, as specifications emerge, especially OAI-PMH repositories and Europeana Metadata Application Profiles initially, but moving forward to semantic web technologies later. EuropeanaLocal builds on existing multiplier networks of local institutions to bring together a consortium that represents 27 countries with broad ranging experience of the cultural sector, digital libraries, standards and aggregation services.

EuropeanaLocal will make over 20 million items available to Europeana. The expected results include the establishment of a network of regional repositories that are highly interoperable with Europeana, an integrated Europeana-EuropeanaLocal prototype service and the development of thematic areas for Europeana services which integrate content from both the national and the local/regional level.