“Today, for the first time, the twenty seven member states of the European Union are celebrating ‘Europeana Awareness Day.’ It is with pleasure, that in the Maltese Islands, this special day is being celebrated here in Gozo and that I am inaugurating here this short awareness ceremony in this hall,” this was said by the Minister for Gozo, Giovanna Debono in her opening speech on the occasion of the European Awareness Day.

The Minister continued, “Europeana is a single access point on the internet to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitized throughout Europe. It is an authoritative source of information coming from European cultural and scientific institutions.

Europeana has four declared objectives:

Aggregate – to build the open trusted source for European cultural and scientific heritage content;

Facilitate – to support the cultural and scientific heritage sector through knowledge transfer, innovation, and advocacy;

Distribute – to make heritage available to users wherever they are, whenever they want it;

Engage – to cultivate new ways for users to participate in their cultural and scientific heritage.

Europeana was conceived after Jacques Chirac, President of France, together with the premiers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Hungary sent to President of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso in April 2005. The letter recommended the creation of a virtual European library, to make Europe’s cultural heritage accessible for all.

The prototype was launched on 20 November 2008. The site gave access to 4.5 million digital objects from over 1,000 contributing organizations, including world-famous national library, gallery, and museum collections from the capitals of Europe.

Due to an unexpected user surge, peaking at an estimated ten million hits, the servers were unable to cope with the massive load. The site was temporarily taken down and, after a series of technical upgrades, went up again in December 2008. Different types of cultural heritage organizations – libraries, museums, archives, and audiovisual collections – made their contents available to Europeana.

Europeana was officially launched in 2010 with access to over 10 million digital objects. Early in 2011 new features on the site included a translation tool and the ability to expand on information by automatically transferring the search term to Wikipedia and other services.

Europeana Awareness Day – that is being organized for the first time – has five objectives:

to publicise Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians, and cultural heritage organizations in every Member State so as to encourage the use and contribution of content, raise awareness of cultural heritage as an economic driver, and promote knowledge transfer;

to promote its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes including recreation and hobbies, research, learning, genealogy and tourism – engaging users via user generation of content, creation of digital stories – as will shortly illustrated – and social networking;

to develop new partnerships with four key sectors that are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organizations, and open culture re-users, programmers, developers, researchers and activists;

to put in place new distribution channels for Europeana content working with the tourism sector;

to further encourage cultural institutions to continue to provide content in particular by: raising awareness of the opportunities provided by the new Europeana Licensing framework; developing mechanisms for collective rights management; and increasing the amount of content in Europeana that can be freely re-used

It is of utmost importance that students become aware of this network – a mine of information for research that can be put to very good use both in the school work as well in the enhancement of one’s hobbies,” the Minister concluded.

This information is accessible through the website www.europeana.eu.

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