The European Digital Platform Europeana

The origins of Europeana, the European platform for access to Europe's digital cultural heritage, date back to April 2005, when French President Jacques Chirac, along with the Prime Ministers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Hungary, sent a letter to the then President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. In this letter, the signatories called for the creation of a virtual European library to make European cultural heritage more accessible to all users through digitisation.

Three years later, in November 2008, the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet) was established as a prototype, which subsequently became Europeana. Europeana, funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), now provides all internet users – cultural workers, cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, researchers, artists, and journalists – with access to more than 50 million items. These include:

• more than 33 million photographs and images,
• more than 27 million textual items,
• over 1,200,000 audio and audio-related items,
• more than 360,000 videos, including many historical recordings,
• and more than 8,000 3D models of archaeological finds, buildings, and other cultural and historical artefacts.

To date, more than 3,000 European institutions have contributed content to Europeana, including museums, galleries, libraries, archives, theatres, and non-governmental organisations. These include the Dutch Rijksmuseum, the British Library, and the French Louvre Museum. Institutions do not collaborate with Europeana directly, but rather through national aggregators, which collect content and data from individual organisations, verify them, add metadata such as geolocation, and link them to other materials and databases through associated persons, places, or topics. All Europeana aggregators are members of the Europeana Aggregators' Forum (EAF), a network of national, regional, domain, and thematic aggregators that aims, among other objectives, to exchange knowledge and best practices to support the aggregation and sharing of data with Europeana.

User experience, content curation, and user engagement

To help users find material more easily and quickly, the Europeana web platform offers search functionality with a wide range of filters, such as theme, media type, and usage rights, as well as country or organisation of origin and language. Results can also be filtered by technical properties, including colour, image orientation, document size, format, and licence.

Europeana also promotes the use of its content through various ways of highlighting individual entries or thematic focuses. One such method is the creation of collections grouped around particular themes, such as newspapers, photography, war, archaeology, fashion, art, or migration. Special collections also bring together content from specific centuries. Among these collections are thematic galleries that group visual material by theme: individual galleries focus, for example, on May Day celebrations in twentieth-century Hungary, the history of maize, depictions of unicorns, and women on bicycles. In addition to collections, Europeana features a stories section, which publishes articles on various historical and cultural topics, enriched with visual material. Articles created by representatives of participating organisations or by staff of the Europeana Foundation cover topics such as the origins of Baroque sculpture in Croatia, the history of summer holiday culture in Soviet Estonia, the life and work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz, the representation of the LGBTQ+ community in twentieth century photography and film, and an introduction to Chemnitz and Nova Gorica as European Capitals of Culture 2025. Stories published on the Europeana platform are also available via a regular newsletter, which can be subscribed to on the website.

In addition to highlighting individual collections, galleries, and stories, Europeana also organises various projects and activities in which users can participate. For example, one project is a competition for the best short story or poem on the theme of climate activism, where authors are invited to draw their inspiration from content on the portal. The portal also organises a monthly online creative writing workshop, in which participants similarly draw inspiration from Europeana's content, and hosts an annual digital storytelling festival. Particular attention is given to educators, for whom lesson plans are prepared and organised by theme, language, and educational level. Users also have access to an open-source application programming interface (API), which can be used, among others, by video game developers.

The Europeana platform serves its purpose well, as evidenced by its receiving over 15,000 visitors per day. Europeana also disseminates news and content through social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Slovenian participating organisations

In Slovenia, the National and University Library is responsible for the National Aggregator of e-Content in the field of culture, ensuring the development and maintenance of the service, which is funded by the Ministry of Culture. More than 130 Slovenian organisations contribute metadata to the aggregator, thereby building it. These include numerous museums (the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, the National Museum of Slovenia, the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, the Gorenjska Museum), archives (the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and various municipal and regional archives), galleries (the National Gallery of Slovenia, the Museum of Modern Art, the Božidar Jakac Art Museum), libraries (Maribor City Library, Kranj City Library, Ljubljana City Library), and theatres (Ljubljana City Theatre, the Slovenian National Opera and Ballet Theatre Ljubljana, Prešeren Theatre Kranj, Theatre Glej). Two organisations contributing materials related to Slovenia are based outside its borders: the Slovene National and Study Library and the Slovene Permanent Theatre in Trieste. The partners also include various institutes (Imaginarni Institute, the Centre IRIS, the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia, the Public Institute Tourism Bohinj), festivals (the Pomurje Summer Festival, the Maribor Theatre Festival), media organisations (Radio-Television Slovenia, the newspaper Večer), as well as the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, the Urban Planning Institute, the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the production house Carmina Slovenica, and the Cankarjev dom Cultural and Congress Centre. Non-institutional organisations that maintain online archives of contemporary art also make a significant contribution, such as the Slovenian Music Information Centre (SIGIC), the Slovenian theatre portal Sigledal.org, and the Ministry of Culture portal for international cooperation, Culture.si.

Slovenian content on Europeana

Slovenian organisations have collectively contributed more than 466,000 items to date. Texts make up the largest share (over 369,000 items), followed by visual and photographic material (over 88,000 items), video content (over 7,800 items), 3D models (over 290 items), and audio content (over 130 items). Among the textual items is a wide selection of historical Slovenian newspapers, such as Slovenski narod, Slovenski gospodar, Edinost, Laibacher Zeitung, Kmetijske in rokodelske novice, and others, as well as many musical scores and manuscripts, including writings by poet Srečko Kosovel. The visual and photographic material includes, among other things, a substantial collection of photographs documenting the architectural – and in particular Art Nouveau – heritage of Ljubljana, as well as many other historical photographs, for instance relating to the First World War. A valuable historical perspective is also offered by video contributions, which were largely produced as part of Radio-Television Slovenia programmes: in addition to older reports on various aspects of Slovenian society, many video items are also connected to relatively recent developments in Slovenian culture. Smaller in scale, yet still informative, is the collection of 3D models, which allow users to explore from various angles a number of Baroque sculptures, many highlights from the history of Slovenian architecture, as well as, for example, the traditional costume of the Slovenian kurenti and a selection of Slovenian monuments (the Alma Karlin monument in Celje, the Prešeren monument in Kranj, the Tito monument in Velenje, and others). Also on display are examples of Slovenian sculpture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The smallest collection is the audio recordings. It includes several ethnological field recordings in which interviewees recall various aspects of Slovenia's past, as well as a collection of field recordings featuring songs, mainly folk songs and songs of folk character.

The Culture.si photo collection

The photo collection of the Culture.si portal, which is part of Europeana, contains more than 4,200 photographs. The collection features images of Slovenia’s architectural heritage and contemporary Slovenian architectural achievements, such as the Ljubljana mosque and the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies (KSEVT) in Vitanje. It also offers a wide range of photographs of major and alternative Slovenian cultural institutions, including museums, galleries, libraries, cinemas, and music venues, as well as an extensive selection of photographs from Slovenian festivals across all artistic disciplines (Druga godba, Lighting Guerrilla, Exodos, Fronta, Festival of Slovenian Film, Seviqc Brežice, Pranger, Red Dawns, Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Days of Poetry and Wine, FeKK, LIFFe, Animateka, Week of Slovenian Drama, and others). The collection also includes photographs of Slovenian media outlets, both current and defunct (Tribuna, HRUPmag, Literatura), as well as publishers, institutes, collectives, and individual artists and intellectuals, such as philosopher Mladen Dolar, singer and songwriter Jani Kovačič, saxophonist Igor Lumpert, artist and filmmaker Jasmina Cibic, and others. In addition, the collection features representative photographs from major Slovenian international projects and appearances abroad, including the Guest of Honour appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair, participation in the Bologna Book Fair, and the European Capital of Culture 2025.

The development team of the Culture.si and Kulturnik portals at the Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory ensured that the metadata for the extensive photo collection on the Culture.si portal is properly organised and can be aggregated on the National Aggregator, and consequently on the Europeana platform. As a result, our contribution to the heritage of contemporary art is now accessible to the wider public on Europeana – from architecture to new media, from sculpture to comics, and from concert posters to photographs of contemporary dance and theatre performances.

External links

• Europeana website
• Culture.si photo collection on Europeana
• Slovenian National Aggregator for Europeana