From the point both of view of technology orthodoxy and good web practice we all know that a destination site is a flawed concept. I am allergic to them because of the way they centralise overhead and demand artificial forms of sustenance (such as ongoing public investment).

That being the case, Europeana is as much about European politics as it is digital cultural content. As a collective endeavour it is a very important, very complex and very fine-tuned vehicle for different nations to achieve specific political agendas. For the Dutch, it is a hook to leverage public investment in digitisation. For the French and Italians, it is an opportunty to showcase domain aggregators of which they are rightly proud.

The plain fact is that the European Commission would find a distributed, open service such as the one you describe very hard to fund - no outcome, no product, no centre. So, you tell me, is it better to stay in our bedroom and insist that the thing is done right, or should we accept its limitations and jump in with both feet to try and steer it in the right direction? I favour the latter, because I think enough good will come out of the process for UK museums to make the investment worthwhile.

On the API/harvest issue - this battle was hard fought and hard won. The original concept was for a database of library OPACs, and it was really an innovation to use any kind of distributed service model. It is worth remembering that different nations are at different points on the technology curve (and we’re by no means the furthest advanced) and that Jill Cousins at Europeana has done a pretty astounding job in getting things as far advanced as they are!

So…we need to bang the drum for doing the job right, but equally we need to recognise that there is a much broader political world into which this thing fits - and it is a world which benefits our museums, even if it isn’t always obvious how!

The elevator pitch of my concern is this: Europeana is, and will continue to be an enormous black hole for a vast quantity of money and, more importantly - a vast quantity of human resource - until it takes a step back and reconsiders itself in the light of what is actually going on on the internet, rather than what cultural heritage institutions think is going on on the internet. This is not - and hasn’t been for about 5 years - about creating some kind of destination portal for heritage content (which is how Europeana currently exists, and seems to be projecting itself).

For Europeana to be successful, it *must* open an accessible API to the content stored on it. If it was me, the UK response should be - “you’re having none of our content until you provide open access to it”. I’d also question OAI-PMH.

Mike