Facts about Europeana

Europeana – an entrance to Europe's cultural heritage! Europeana is a joint entrance to collections from libraries, archives and museums across Europe.

A European digital library for everybody – researchers, professionals and the public.

Europeana (www.europeana.eu,) is the common place where people can search in books, journals, films, maps, photos, music etc. from every corner of Europe.

The objective of Europeana

• To make digitalised material from Europe's libraries, archives and museums accessible online to everybody, whether they are searching as a tourist, a researcher, in connection with teaching or something else.
• To preserve the cultural heritage for coming generations.
• To make research results widely accessible online and to secure them for the future.

In order to achieve this, the Europeana portal is being developed as an entrance to the digital copies of material found at libraries, museums and archives.

Today, if someone wishes to search in ‘analogue time’ for information on Rembrandt, for instance, it may be necessary to travel all over Europe to find the relevant material. With Europeana, on the other hand, they will have access to information online regardless of where the originals are stored or exhibited. This will include information about Rembrandt's work, books and films about him, his sketches and paintings, photos etc.

Amount of data

As of 1 February 2010, Europeana contains 5 million records. These are distributed across:

• Images: photos, paintings, drawings, postcards and posters (4,100,000 objects)
• Texts: books, newspaper articles, manuscripts, letters (1,800,000 objects)
• Videos: films, documentaries, TV broadcasts (90,000 objects)
• Sounds: cylinders, 78 rpm discs, radio, field recordings (22,000 objects)

So far, Denmark's contribution represents less than 1 % of all material available at Europeana.

The organisation of Europeana

Europeana is a thematic network, which forms part of the European Commission's eContentplus programme, which supports cross-national projects that focus on digital content and digital, web-based services.

Europeana consists of a partnership of 100 representatives within cultural heritage and knowledge organisations, as well as IT experts from all of Europe. They all participate in the development of Europeana and solve technical and user-related jobs.

The project is headed by a team based at the National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek. The overall management of Europeana is handled by The Europeana Foundation.