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FIAT/IFTA Keynote: Europeana Uncensored

Students from the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image participated in the 2014 World Conference of FIAT/IFTA. They share their impressions in a series of blog reports. Lenka Suchá wrote this report.

When the lunchtime buzz along the corridors of Pakhuis de Zwijger died down on Thursday afternoon, it was time for Harry Verwayen, the deputy director of Europeana (www.europeana.eu), to take the main stage and kick off the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2014 keynote speeches.

Sharing made attractive

Mr Verwayen first introduced the Europeana platform to those members of the audience who may have not been too familiar with it. He drew some interesting parallels between the personal, authentic relationships that the Airbnb community is grounded in. He suggested that archives should make the most of their reputation and the recent trend of trust mechanics that developed in the online domain. Instead of just being trustworthy repositories, archives need to open up and engage their users to remain relevant in the 21st century. Harry Verwayen put out a call to archives to share their best material and rich data with Europeana to help them on their quest to make digital heritage widely available.

Looking back and going forward

A success story that shows how Europeana can engage with the public is the 1914-1918 campaign, which was launched to commemorate the centenary of the Great War and has so far resulted in 600,000 digitised items and 5,000 collected stories from individual contributors. Mr Verwayen also elaborated on initiatives that are currently being developed or have recently been launched as part of the Europeana platform, for instance specialised topic-related channels (on fashion, for example), the award-winning Europeana Beacon App or the Van Go Yourself project that encourages creative engagement with online audiences.  Alongside these activities, Europeana’s key aim is to make more of their digital material available for re-use by negotiating policies and resolving copyright issues.

Q&A: Help us help you

The questions and discussion following the talk clearly identified the need of a two-way relationship between Europeana and contributing archives. Especially smaller archives might be able to benefit from the platform’s EU-wide reach, its ability to work with policy makers and raise awareness for the cause. Since government funding and support are dependent on hard evidence and unambiguous results, Europeana’s soon to be launched tracking and sharing of re-use statistics was seen as a step in the right direction by the audience. Despite the talk being part of the World Conference, Mr Verwayen specified that due to funding issues, the platform was only able to aggregate content that is relevant to Europe. Finally, a member of the audience suggested that Europeana should work more with archives to define what their “best stuff” is in order for them to be able to offer their best materials.

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