WHY AND HOWTO CONTRIBUTE TO EUROPEANA

Thanks to the worldwide prestige achieved by Europeana and the importance attributed to the project not only by European Governments and the EC, but also by other international organisations and projects such as the Digital Public Library of America, institutions contributing data to Europeana easily gain visibility. ¹

The results of a Europeana survey highlight that users prefer visiting the websites of the content-providing institutions. They find it useful to view the digital object in its original context thus increasing traffic to the websites of the original institutions. ²

"Europeana adds value to the content by juxtaposing related images, texts, videos and audio items, thereby ‘repatriating’ contents geographically dispersed into a single, coherent and contextual virtual space". ²

"Europeana enriches users’ experience, giving them the opportunity to study related content, which comes , and offers them in a single virtual space. Moreover, the multilingual interface makes it possible for users to search in their native language and retrieve objects that are otherwise inaccessible to them". ²

"Knowledge transfer is a key reason for being part of the Europeana network. There are critical issues that all European content providers and aggregators deal with, including object modelling, semantic and technical interoperability of data, multilingual access, IPR (Intellectual Property Right) and business models for sustainability. ²

Even small institutions which would not otherwise have enough human, financial, and technical resources, may be part of Europeana. ²

"Europeana will expose metadata to search engines, making deep web content accessible". ³

Cost benefits

To participate in Europeana is an investment both from the cultural and economic point of view as well as an opportunity to have access to European calls for proposals and funding.

DIRECT BENEFITS Benefits for Europeana and its participating investors and partner institutions	increased visibility of the contents decreased cost of providing access through open source code cost savings by standardization of metadata cost savings through knowledge transfer
INDIRECT BENEFITS Benefits that, through market transactions, are transmitted to consumers and producers in other markets	time saving by researchers creation of new businesses in area's such as tourism creation of new jobs in the creative industries cost savings in the educational market
EXTERNAL BENEFITS Benefits that can be seen as positive consequences of the actions of Europeana	the strengthening of a shared European Culture that help foster Euroepean identity the promotion and enabling of diversity the increase of social inclusion the improvement of multimedia literacy

Source: Europeana - Cost & Benefits (PDF).

NOTES

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1 The Europeana Aggregator Handbook 2010 (PDF) ↑
2 The Europeana Aggregator Handbook 2011 (PDF) ↑
3 Europeana Professional - Provide data ↑