In March 2013 LoCloud (http://locloud.eu) project has been launched. It is a Best Practice Network co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP program aimed at enhancing the Europeana content by adding over 4 million items form European cultural institutions. On 19-20th March, at the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, project was officially launched. The meeting gathered 32 partners from 28 different countries to present, plan and discuss the activities of the project over the next three years. Content from small and medium local institutions such as museums, archives and libraries is still underrepresented in the digital European area. Cloud-based technology could offer an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available on-line.

Project aims to develop cloud-based technology and services to help small and medium local institutions to aggregate their digital resources and make them accessible on-line, via Europeana.eu, the European Library, Museum and Archive. The project will explore the potential of a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also develop a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handling relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content.

LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium.