OpenCulture

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I recently accepted the role of Chair of the Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators.The Council is a cross-industry body which connects content providers and aggregators including museums, archives, libraries, broadcasters and publishers throughout Europe.

I have taken on this role because I believe that there stands before us an opportunity to transform the way that digital cultural content is discovered, used, curated and distributed, and in the process to take culture to an entirely new and much larger audience.

I am really excited about the Council and the opportunity it presents to have these important cross-cutting conversations in an open forum. This is why I would like to extend an invitation to content providers and aggregators throughout the UK to join the Council and to become part of this conversation.

Every type of organisation or project that provides or will provide content to Europeana is welcome to join the Council. To join, all you need to do is register at http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/councilregistration

There is a full meeting of all Council members annually, and other meetings as needed. The first of these will be a plenary meeting, to be held in Amsterdam on the 13th and 14th October. At this meeting, we will be setting out an ambitious work programme designed to help us overcome some of the key obstacles to the emergence of a Digital Economy based on aggregation and distributed re-use.

Members join the Council in order to:

• Share best practice and common standards between museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.  Seek common solutions to issues affecting holders of digitised heritage material
• Enable knowledge and technology transfer between different institutions, domains and countries
• Improve users’ experience by integrating all types of content through Europeana
• Enrich their content by displaying it alongside related material from other countries, other domains
• Be part of an award-winning, highly visible portal that is the focus of political attention
• Demonstrate the relevance of cultural and scientific heritage institutions to new generations of users

Members are asked to communicate the value of providing content to Europeana to their own national and domain networks, but apart from participating and sharing information, there are no responsibilities or costs associated with membership of the Council.

More information and a full list of current members of the Council is given at: http://www.version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-foundation/content-council

For further information, please contact feedback@europeana.eu. I am always keen to talk to anyone about Europeana and what it can do for their organisation, so do please leave me a note on this blog, or email me at nick@collectionstrust.org.uk to find out more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Digitisation, Europe, General, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.