Europeana is an initiative of the European Union, financed by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility and European Union Member States. It provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with digital access to European cultural heritage material. The goal is to inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about European history and culture, share and enjoy cultural heritage and re-use it to create new things.
The Europeana platforms display cultural heritage material from over 3700 different institutions, by creating a network of aggregating partners that collect the data, check it thoroughly, and enrich it with information like geo-location, or links to other material or datasets through associated people, places, or topics.
One of the projects by the Europeana initiative is Europeana Space, which aims to create new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative industries sector based on Europe’s rich digital cultural resources. It provides an open environment for the development of applications and services based on digital cultural content. The use of this environment will be fostered by a vigorous, wide-ranging and sustainable programme of promotion, dissemination and replication of the Best Practices developed within the project.
