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https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/2048211/europeana_fashion_NMA_0035032.html?q=
Europeana is the European Commission’s digital platform for cultural heritage. It aims to make Europe’s cultural heritage more accessible and to make the collections digitised by different cultural institutions around Europe findable and searchable in one only access point.
The first Europeana prototype was launched on 20 November 2008, as a result of a letter signed in 2005 by six heads of Member States (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary) and addressed to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, asking the creation of a virtual European library. From the beginning, Europeana was not just a library because museums, archives and galleries joined it. In 2010 the prototype became an operational service and in 2015 Europeana was turned into one of the European Commission’s Digital Service Infrastructures.[1]
Today, Europeana website, called Europeana Collections, gathers more than 58 million digital objects. However, because Europeana doesn’t digitise directly the objects but only brings together the digitised collections of other institutions, it is worth analysing how much the EU Member States contribute to it (I considered the United Kingdom as still as a Member State because I think that its withdraw on 31 January 2020 hasn’t affected its contribution to the platform yet).
The two bar charts compare the percentage of European content per Member State in November 2010 and, nearly ten years later, in February 2020. The 2010 French predominance is exceeded by the Netherlands, whose contents are almost 17% of the whole present Europeana collections. Today France is the third contributor, whereas Germany maintains the second place sliding from 17.1% to 10.02%. Furthermore, during the decade, the United Kingdom, Poland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary and the Czech Republic increase their percentage. In 2013 Croatia decided to join the EU and, later, also the platform. Finally, the right chart shows an increase of the NON-EU States, which are classified as “Others” in the 2010 Report.
The comparison shows some features, like the drop of the Irish contribution from 6.47% to 0.22%, but only the below bar chart race, based on the States’ contribution measured in October 2011, May 2014, January 2016, August 2018 and February 2020, help to understand when it happened.
Until May 2014 Ireland’s number of digital objects had grown up to 1,093,836, then declined to 256,098 in 2016 and to 122,403 in 2018; only in the last two years, the Irish presence in Europeana has slightly increased. The most significant leap is, without doubt, the Netherlands, which rose extremely quickly between 2014 and 2018. In addition, the chart illustrates the notable contribution of Norway, NON-EU Member State, which is in fifth place overall.
Focusing on the current situation of Europeana, the map shows geographically the grade of the contribution of the European States. The core lies in the Netherlands, and this is not surprising because the Europeana Foundation is based in The Hague, housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and its staff works mainly there. Moreover, the most contributing states are close to the Netherlands, whereas the peripherical states, especially those in Eastern Europe, provide less content to the platform.
It could be argued that Germany or France contribute more because they are larger states, therefore they have more collections, more cultural institutions, more staff devoted to the cultural heritage. The following scatter plot provides information on the per capita contribution of the EU Member States to Europeana: although it is based on a simple operation (number of objects/population) and doesn’t take into account other important elements, like the Gross domestic product or the cultural heritage which each state manages, it shows the effort that each country makes to digitise its collections in proportion to its population.
The scatter plot reveals something new. The Netherlands always comes first, but the second and third states are unexpected: Sweden and Estonia, respectively with 0.415094 and 0.412323 digital objects per capita, while major content providers like France and Germany are far below the average. It gives a completely new overview of how the states join Europeana, considering the number of objects not in absolute but in proportion.
Moving to the metadata of the digital objects on Europeana, the media category is one important filter for refining a search and was taken into account also in the 2015-2017 Cultural Heritage: Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation Report. The interactive visualisation below, based on data retrieved in February 2020, helps to understand how the media categories (Image, Text, Video, Sound, 3D) are present in the platform and how much each country contributes to each one.
At first glance, Image is the most represented media category on Europeana, followed by Text. Filtering the view, the major Image contributors are the ones expected: the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, whereas for Text they are Spain, Norway, Poland and France. Otherwise, the largest number of videos is provided by Hungary and the Czech Republic and of 3D content by Austria and Spain. The lack of 3D content from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and many other countries could lead them to develop this media category, trying to bring local projects to Europeana. A similar reflection can be made for sound and video, other poorly represented categories on the platform.
Lastly, it is worth analysing the usability of the digitised material available on Europeana. On its website, Europeana states:
“We bring together the organisations that have great content with the people and sectors that want to research, share and create new things. Creative collaboration and teamwork matter to us, because that’s where the best ideas come from. We’re always pushing each other forward, innovating with technology to make culture part of everyone’s lives.’[2]
To reach this aim, free re-usable digital objects should be the vast majority. Europeana allows users to filter results by rights statements, which are grouped into three categories:
- Free Re-use (which includes Public Domain Marked, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA);
- Limited Re-use (CC BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, No Copyright-Other Known Legal Restrictions, No Copyright-Non Commercial Use Only, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted, Out of copyright-non commercial re-use);
- No Re-use (In Copyright, Copyright Not Evaluated, Right reserved-Free access).
The diagram illustrates the rights statements applied to the digital objects on Europeana per State. Less than half of the contents is free re-usable, but the no re-usable objects overcome the ones under limited re-use rights statements. This visualisation could help to understand which states Europeana should raise awareness to make its collections as open and reusable as possible: for instance, Italy, whose most content is not reusable.
To conclude, these visualizations gave an overview of the development and current status of Europeana, with reference to the contribution of each Member State. Europeana has undoubtedly been a great step forward to collect the digitised European heritage in one place and to offer scholars, students, teachers and above all citizens access to their heritage. The risk that has emerged is that Europeana will become too Dutch-centric: although the headquarters is in The Hague and it is obvious that there are closer ties with this country, it is a European Union’s platform. I believe that the next efforts will have to try to involve more closely countries such as Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Finland because all the European heritage must be represented on Europeana.
We transform the world with culture. We build on Europe’s rich cultural heritage and make it easier for people to use for work, learning or pleasure. Our work contributes to an open, knowledgeable and creative society.[3]
(Europeana’s Mission)
[1] Europeana, ‘History’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission/history
[2] Europeana, ‘About us – the Europeana idea’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission/about-us
[3] Europeana, ‘Our mission’, viewed on 28/02/2020, https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission