Digital Libraries: Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-2015

The Europeana project has released the Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-2015.

Here's an excerpt:

Launched as a proof of concept in 2008, with 2 million objects from 27 EU countries, Europeana spent 2009 and 2010 creating an operational service and ingesting a critical mass of data from some 1500 providers across Europe. Together with content partners and aided by Europe’s leading research universities, we now have a strong and vibrant network of museums, archives and libraries.

We are achieving our objective as an aggregator, and aim to give access to all of Europe’s digitised cultural heritage by 2025. However, to remain successful in the future we need now to move from a centralised role to a more distributed model. Europeana will take its place in a wider European information space, collaborating with other aggregators of content. From the users’ perspective, Europeana’s content will be readily accessible in the places they frequent online—social networks, educational sites and cultural spaces. Our ambition is to provide new forms of access to culture, to inspire creativity and stimulate social and economic growth. To achieve this, Europeana and its stakeholders grapple with major challenges. Primary among these are the intellectual property barriers to digitisation. Europeana will become outmoded if it is not renewed through access to 20th and 21st century material. To ensure such access, more concerted efforts are needed at a European level to deal with orphan works and rights harmonisation. Secondly, it is vital that the digitisation of Europe’s cultural and intellectual record is accelerated. Thirdly, long-term funding needs to be secured for both Europeana and the ecosystem of content providers and aggregators that supplies its lifeblood.

In this strategic plan we outline our approach to these challenges and to creating value for the stakeholders and users. Over the next five years, Europeana will focus on four strategic tracks:

• aggregate content to build the open trusted source of European heritage
• facilitate knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy in the cultural heritage sector
• distribute their heritage to users wherever they are, whenever they want it
• engage users in new ways of participating in their cultural heritage

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