Europeana Research

We transform the world with culture! We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning or just for fun.

Undertaking research on the digitised content of Europe's galleries, museums, libraries and archives has huge potential, especially for the digital humanities and social sciences. But issues of licencing, interoperability and access can often impede the re-use of that data in research. Europeana Research aims to help with these issues, liberating cultural heritage for use in research.

Much of Europeana's dataset is already available for re-use via its API, portal and linked data set. But we can do more to focus on researchers. For example:

• Building focussed aggregations of content, particularly full-text;
• Exposing Europeana's aggregations of text and metadata to allow research teams and infrastructures to build specific tools and services;
• Linking disparate collections and tools in different institutions and building workflows between them;
• Highlighting collections in the Europeana dataset of specific interest to researchers;
• And working with other research infrastructures, eg DARIAH and CLARIN, to tackle big strategic issues we can't tackle alone.

So in 2015, we will be undertaking the following six pieces of work:

• 1) Exploring how full text and images from the Europeana Newspapers project can be made available for re-use;
• 2) Building a full-text API based on Europeana Newspapers;
• 3) Highlight other collections of interest to the research community;
• 4) Continuing to gather user requirements for Europeana Research;
• 5) Developing a Content Strategy for Europeana Research;
• 6) Exposing Europeana data via the CLARIN infrastructure.

We will work with research infrastructures such as CLARIN and DARIAH to help address strategic issues, and set up an advisory board.

And in 2016, we will be adding these pieces of work:

1) Developing a Grants Programme;

2) Expanding Collections for Re-Use on Europeana Research;

3) Embedding Europeana content in the Nemo (Nedimah Methods Ontology);

4) Continuing exploration of use case of European Content.