Europeana
Wikimedia Commons
Europeana

The idea of a Cultural Commons is fundamental to the successful operation of a web ecology of content and services. Underpinning the foundation of this Commons is a set of resources in the public domain that are owned collectively or ‘held in common’ and shared openly among the community. With the release under a CC0 waiver of more than 20 million metadata records in their repository, Europeana has collectively taken a major step towards the goal of opening up data to enable access. Instead of trying to bring the user to Europeana, Europeana wants to take the material to the user. Europeana is doing this by developing strategic partnerships, by paving the way for creative re-use by developers and by providing the infrastructure that offers opportunities for creating new meaningful ways to access and interpret culture. And Wikipedia is one of the best ways to do this.

Direct projects

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By direct projects we mean those projects in which Europeana staff is directly involved.

Current projects

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Concluded projects

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As part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, Europeana ran a campaign focused on personal stories of migration. Part of the campaign is to create a useful and multilingual vocabulary of migration-related terms that GLAMs can use in their metadata.

There are 61 terms for this migration-vocabulary list. Tracked was the translation status on Wikidata for all official EU languages (plus any other language which wishes to be involved) for their labels, descriptions, and the label of their 'subclass of' property. From a baseline of 1, within four days 14 languages had label-translations above 90% complete, and in just over a month the labels of 24 languages were brought to 100% translated.

 

In 2017, as part of the centenary of WWI commemorations, Europeana is challenging Wikimedia affiliates to create a portfolio of their past and current activities relating to the theme of 1914-18. These portfolios will be judged by jury, submissions close on July 31. Europeana will showcase the collection of portfolios to demonstrate the diverse, innovative, and high-quality ways that this important period of Europe's history can be understood through open-access heritage, with an emphasis on working with its partner cultural institutions across the continent.

European GLAMwiki Coordinators meeting

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The UNESCO conference room, 2017 edition
  • 2015. In March 2015 Europeana convened the first meeting/workshop of Europe's GLAMwiki Coordinators across 15 Wikimedia Chapters. This event was hosted at the office of Wikimedia France in Paris. Full minutes and reports from this meeting can be found at the project page.
  • 2017. Following the 2015 edition, the second reunion of European GLAMwiki coordiantors to plan join projects and share best practices. Twice the number of attendees, including User-Groups and WMF scholarships. Hosted at UNESCO HQ in Paris. See full report at This Month in GLAM.

Art History Challege

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Video report

The Europeana Art History Challenge is a Wikidata-based, Wikipedia-translation competition run in association with the Europeana 280 campaign. 10 artworks from each participating country have been submitted to the new "Art History Channel" and a competition is now underway to increase the quality and amount of metadata and Wikipedia-translations of these artworks.

Wikimedia Task Force

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The final report of the recommendations by the Task Force

Task Forces are the method by which Europeana can receive formal input from different sectors to inform its decisions and strategy. The Wikimedia Task Force will look at technological developments in the Wikimedia community recommending a way to move forward in Europeana's involvement with the development of technological solutions. Additionally, the TF aims to give practical recommendations on how to engage with the Wikimedia community in order to build fruitful long-term relations in the sector.

GLAMWiki Toolset project

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The GLAMwiki Toolset project is a collaboration between Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimédia France, Wikimedia CH and Europeana. The goal of the project is to provide a set of tools to make batch uploads of GLAM content in Wikimedia Commons as easy as possible. The additional tools have to make sure that re-use can easily be tracked; and that Commons materials can easily be integrated back into the collection of the original GLAM or even other GLAMs.

Cross language search support

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Europeana content is described in about 30-40 languages so Europeana has created a feature which allows users to automatically translate search keywords into a maximum of 6 languages of your choice. The function is built on top of the Wikipedia API. In the background is matching the users' keywords with Wikipedia article titles linked across multiple languages. Read more about this on the Europeana blog.

Cite function

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All items appearing in the Europeana database have a "Cite on Wikipedia" link that automatically creates the MediaWiki code needed to insert a footnote referencing that page. For example, each one of these freely-licensed images of Bulgarian poet Dora Gabe (Wikipedia article) has a Wikipedia citation option on the left-hand column, right next to "share" and "translate".

Satellite projects

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By Satellite projects we mean (co)funded projects in the Europeana ecosystem connecting to Wikimedia

Current

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Wikidata import painting information

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Using the Europeana API, contributors attempting to create a record item for every single painting in a GLAMs collection on Wikidata. See, for example, Dutch art museums that have already been imported.

Import of Wikimedia Commons media to Europeana

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A beta/test feature that enables users to export multimedia items from Wikimedia Commons, specifically objects created as part of "Wiki Loves x"-competitions that Europeana has sponsored, and import them into Europeana - enabling them to be searched within the wider Europeana database .

EAGLE

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EAGLE, The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy is a best-practice network co-funded by the European Commission, under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme. EAGLE will provide a single user-friendly portal to the inscriptions of the Ancient World, a massive resource for both the curious and for the scholarly. The EAGLE Best Practice Network is part of Europeana, a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections. EAGLE will collect, in a single readily-searchable database, more than 1.5 million items, currently scattered across 25 EU countries, as well as the east and south Mediterranean. The project will make available the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions of the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, a translation into English. The technology that will support the EAGLE project is state-of-the-art and tailored to provide the user with the best and most intuitive possible experience. Our services will include a mobile application, enabling tourists to understand inscriptions they find on location by scanning with a smartphone, and a story-telling application that will allow teachers and experts to assemble epigraphy-based narratives. A multilingual Wiki will be set up for the enrichment and enhancement of epigraphic images and texts, which will provide a basis for future translations of inscriptions into other European languages. The results of the EAGLE project will be disseminated as widely as possible, both within the scholarly community and within the public at large. To this end, EAGLE will publish its own Wikimedia Commons, and will also develop an inscription-themed documentary with a related teaser video. EAGLE will work within the Europeana, and with its sister projects, to ensure full and effective integration within this flagship project to make European culture globally available. The EAGLE MediaWiki (with WikiBase) now contains more than 10000 items both added via specific scripts and mappings and added by users of the eagle community. a lot of users engagement took place, in Ljubljana in February 2014, in Herculaneum in collaboration with the Herculaneum Graffiti Project and in Rome (presentation given), with great success. This Mediawiki is now partially integrated with perseids with the aim to make the needs of the two communities involved converge with mutual benefits. on one side Epigraphist and historians want academically reliable translations, on the other the wiki must always be open for contributions. with the cooperation with perseids an editor of the EAGLE mediawiki will have the possibility to submit its translation via Perseids. </gallery>

Concluded projects

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Europeana Awareness

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During 2012 and 2013 Europeana worked closely with Wikimedia Sverige on a number of events, which also involved many European chapters. This also inspired the production of a number of big case studies and manuals:

Below you will also find more detailed descriptions on how Wikimedia worked together with different parts of the Europeana Network with specially designed events.

Europeana 1989

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Europeana 1989 is pan-European project concerning the political and social changes in Central and Eastern Europe in the year 1989; commonly known as the fall of the Iron Curtain. The project aims to create a vivid and complete picture of the revolutionary events in Europe with stories, photos, videos and sound recordings from every country affected. If you ever wondered what it would be like to live by the standards of a different political ideology, or what it would be like for the political landscape you lived in to change almost overnight, check Europeana 1989 project, which documents the time when the very symbol of the division of Europe was torn down, and states dominated by one-party dictatorships could finally move towards democracy. By collecting personal memorabilia and stories from this period, and combining it with institutional collections, the project aims to create an engaging user experience. All items are shared online at www.europeana1989.eu with a CC-BY-SA license, so we can reuse them on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Some GLAMs are partnering this project: Narodowy Instytut Audiowizualny and the Poznań Supercomputing Networking Center of Poland, National Library of Estonia, National Library of Latvia, National Library of Lithuania, Institute of Contemporary History and National Museum of Prague in the Czech Republic, Open Society Archives (Hungary) and Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and Facts & Files from Germany.

Goals
  1. We are uploading all E1989 images on Commons and we invite you to reuse them on your home wiki.
  2. We did a 1989 challenge to improve Wikipedia-related content.

Europeana 1914-1918

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Europeana 1914-1918 is a crowd sourcing that Europeana has set up to collect WWI stories directly from the public. The focus is on personal and unpublished items, including letters, postcards, diaries, drawings, photographs and trench art from all over Europe. Contributions can be made in two ways: Online via the Europeana 1914-1918 website or at family history roadshows, to which members of the public bring their memorabilia to be digitised and recorded by the project team. Since the project started in 2011, 30 roadshows have been held in eight different countries. Between 2013 and 2018, more roadshows will be held across Europe.

The project homepage on Commons is at Commons:Europeana#Europeana 1914-18 and all the files can be found at Commons:Europeana/Europeana 1914-1918. [This Commons upload project is not to be confused with the 1914-18 Challenge, above.]

In the run-up to 2014 and in the following years, strong interest in the topic is expected from a wide variety of users – including the general public, local and family historians, education professionals, archives, museums and historical societies, people working in the media, the arts or in the tourism industry. We can use most of this content (images of) to improve Wikipedia articles.

Europeana Fashion

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Europeana Fashion is a best practice network of 22 partners which represent the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain. The consortium is aggregating and providing to Europeana the most outstanding and rich materials about the history of European fashion, including more than 700.000 fashion-and costume-related digital objects, such as historical dresses to accessories, photographs, posters, drawings, sketches, videos, fashion catalogues, and more.

Connections between Europeana Fashion and Wikimedia
  1. Content donations: More than 1.700 Europeana Fashion images were uploaded to Commons and Wikipedians are encouraged to reuse them in articles.
  2. Editathons: Europeana Fashion organized twelve edit-a-thons in nine countries in collaboration with local Wikimedia chapters and volunteers from the Wikimedia community.
  1. Challenge: Wikimedia Sverige set up a month-long online Challenge to write about footwear
  2. Handbook:A manual for organizing fashion editathons has been developed. This manual can also be of use for non-fashion related editathons.
  3. Special Project: To create a visual classification system for its multilingual fashion thesarus, Europeana Fashion commissioned Hungarian fashion student David Ring to make an illustration of each object type in the thesaurus hierarchy. Europeana Fashion partners MoMu – Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp and Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels teamed up with Wikimedia Belgium in September 2014 to also make these illustrations available under a CC0 license on Wikimedia Commons. The approximately 250 ink-on-paper drawings have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Europeana Fashion hopes that the illustrations will not only serve to enhance searching Europeana Fashion content through visual classification or to support Wikipedia articles, but that they could play an instrumental role in Europeana's goal to promote and enable greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by creative industries.

Europeana Challenges

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Wiki Loves Public Art

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Wiki Loves Public Art was an international photo contest focusing on artworks that are publicly accessible. The contest was organized for the in May 2013 in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain (Barcelona) and Sweden by the Wikimedia movement in cooperation with Europeana.

Europeana partner projects

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There have been a number of projects in which Europeana partners (individual GLAMs) work with Wikimedia. These cooperation have sometime been supported by Europeana with contact information and introductions.

For a global list of GLAM-WIKI partnerships, see Outreach wiki's GLAM case studies

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

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Recommend tool for re-use: creased artists link template - Links from wiki artist biography article to Europeana items referencing the artist. See template. see use Larry Abramson sample "External links"

  • Wiki Loves Public Art and Monuments in Israel - three rounds of the outdoor art photography contest in both Wiki Loves Monuments [1] and Public Art. Some artwork photos were then published on Europeana.
  • Europeana Fashion - Joint project including an Edit-a-thon for items published on Europeana

See also

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  • Wikidata:Europeana - a version of this list, focusing only on projects relating to Wikidata.