Managing cultural heritage content in the context of Europeana

Abstract

There is a trend in cultural organizations, such as, libraries, museums, archives, to digitize or to make available via the Web digitally born content, which turns to be vital for them. However, this mass digital production arise interoperability issues on metadata schemes, harvesting, protocols and systems and other critical points like access, intellectual property and preservation. In this context, Europeana is developing a common multilingual access point, which will make it possible to search Europe’s distributed digital cultural heritage online. The Europeana service tries to manage this cultural heritage content by applying automated metadata harvesting model in a range of distributed repositories. This effort is enhanced by the best practice network project EuropeanaLocal, which will help local and regional libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives to make the enormous amount of content that they hold available through Europeana and deliver new services. This paper analyzes the cultural heritage management prototype within Europeana and EuropeanaLocal framework. Finally, it emphasizes, as a case study, on the effort that the Greek cultural content repositories make to incorporate the Europeana’s standards, in order to provide Europeana service with cultural heritage content metadata through OAI-PMH automated harvesting procedure.