Following up on my recent post about "The New Renaissance" report on digital cultural heritage in the European context, I wanted to share this recent press release announcing the availability of the Strategic Plan 2011-2015 for the Europeana program. I think this will be of interest to any organization looking at strategies for capturing, organizing and sharing digital cultural heritage materials at scale.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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Press Release          For immediate release 

The Hague              19.01.11

Europeana's Strategic Plan 2011-2015, has been published by the Europeana Foundation. The Plan comes as a timely response to last week's report from the Comité des Sages which recommended 'a clear vision and planŠfor the further development of Europeana.'

 

The Strategic Plan outlines the approach Europeana will take in the changing information landscape. In the next few years, one specific focus for Europeana will be on enhancing the users' experience. It will give users access to cultural heritage content wherever they are and whenever they want it, making it available through APIs and search widgets, in teaching resources, on blogs, college sites and social networks. Europeana will also explore new ways of actively engaging users in the development of the site and making creative reuse of its content.

 

Download the full colour version or the black and white print version of the Strategic Plan 2011-2015.

ENDS

 

Jonathan Purday +44 (0) 1937 546614 jonathan.purday@bl.uk

 

Europeana ( www.europeana.eu) is a partnership of European cultural heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised content of Europe's galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 15 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 27 European languages. Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.

 

Comité des Sages (The High-Level Reflection Group) was created in April 2010 to make recommendations to the European Commission, European cultural institutions and any stakeholders, on ways and means to make Europe's cultural heritage and creativity available on the Internet and to preserve it for future generations. It was set up by Neelie Kroes, Vice President responsible for the Digital Agenda, and Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education and Culture.

The Comité des Sages' members are Maurice Lévy (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of advertising and communications company Publicis), Elisabeth Niggemann (Director-General of the German National Library and chair of the Europeana Foundation) and Jacques De Decker (author and Permanent Secretary of Belgium's Royal Academy of French language and literature).

 

The New Renaissance, the Comité des Sages' report on digital cultural heritage, was released to the Commission on January 10, 2010. The report recommended that Europeana 'should become the central reference point for Europe's online cultural heritage.'