#Europeana is open source as well

The Europeana conference has come and gone. It brought together organisations in the GLAM sector to Amsterdam to consider how this common platform will help improve the cultural landscape for the participating organisations and for the European public.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Europeana. Just one of the aspects that I learned about is that their involvement in the development of the Creative Commons Public Domain mark. The need for Europeana is for a complete architecture of registrations of the copyright status of an object. They combined it with additional meta data in the mark for an object that is really relevant.

Even when an object is in the public domain, it is relevant to know where the object can be found and, who did the research on the copyright status. As this data is available in a uniform way, it facilitates the use of material.

Europeana the software is open source its development was paid by the EU. As a result, the software has been localised in many languages. This does not mean that the information about objects that are conserved by European GLAMS is only there for Europeans. Dutch museums and archives have much that is relevant to its former colonies and so do the English, French and German museums.

Europeana welcomes localisations in languages like Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese.. It welcomes people from all over the world to learn how Europeana can be of use. It welcomes feedback as it is busy realising its potential.
Thanks,
       GerardM