Europeana Creative is a project that enables and promotes greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by the creative industries. Last week, the project released its first annual report, summarising all of the various activities it deployed.
Sound & Vision oversees the development of 5 pilots in the project. These pilots make use of items available through Europeana to showcase how digital cultural heritage can be creatively reused and implemented in fun, interactive applications.
Highlights
Much has been accomplished during the first year. Some highlights include:
- Specifications for online and offline laboratory spaces (see Europeana Labs below);
- Development of the technical infrastructure to allow re-use of digital cultural heritage content and tool development;
- Requirements and specifications for the content layer of the extended Europeana Licensing Framework that will allow access to content via specific re-use scenarios and condition rights statements such as Creative Commons;
- Start of 4 project pilots that will demonstrate the creative re-use of Europeana data.
We learned some valuable lessons this year. These include: The limitations that copyrighted content lends to creative industry re-use; how the quality of digitized content affects re-use and the development of a deeper understanding of how creative industries and cultural organizations can work together through the pilots.
Sound & Vision in Creative
Sound & Vision runs the pilots section of the project. So far, we've overseen the development of four pilots, two of which are almost completed. The pilots in Europeana Creative start with a co-creation workshop, where we come up with interesting ideas for creative re-use of cultural heritage content. These are then are developed into fully realised applications. The project develops business models for all pilots to help the incubation process and possibly spin off the product into the creative sector.
Sound & Vision, along with the British Library, is the lead designer and content provider for the Social Networks pilot. This pilot will encourage people to use an application to enrich sounds by linking content from Europeana, Wikipedia and other sources on the web. The pilot kicked off in November 2013 and the prototype version will be available in spring 2014. Sound & Vision also helped arranging for the pilots’ open-innovation challenge events, the first of which are coming up on April 29th in Brussels.
Image: Europeana Culture Collage, developed by Monique Szpak in Europeana Labs
Europeana Creative's R&D
As a part of this project, the Europeana Foundation developed Europeana Labs. It is an attempt to facilitate creative industries to re-use code and content. Europeana Labs gives developers access to cultural and scientific images, texts, and audiovisual collections from Europe’s leading cultural organizations. At the online portal, developers can easily find copyright cleared datasets, instructions for how to utilize the Europeana API, as well as other openly licensed tools for managing cultural content.
Additionally, there are Living Labs in Barcelona / Palma de Mallorca (Platoniq’s YOUCOOP CoLaboratory), Brussels (European Schoolnet’s Future Classroom Lab), Helsinki (Aalto University’s Media Factory) and Paris (youARhere’s i-Matériel.Lab) where individuals can go to play, develop, test and build applications. The website is currently in its alpha stage but there is already plenty to browse. Updated releases are expected in March 2014, July 2014 and January 2015.
More info
- Take some time to read through the yearly report to see all the happenings this past year in Europeana Creative.
- Designers or web developers who are interested in participating in the challenges can sign up here.
- More about Labs’ progress this year can be read in the Open Culture Lab report [PDF].