The re-use of (open) digital content is an essential part of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Several activities are already stimulating the re-use of cultural heritage in order to demonstrate the social and economic value of cultural content. With the publication of the Europeana metadata under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) in September 2012, further development of innovative applications based on this metadata is now possible. Europeana Creative takes this a step further by facilitating re-use of the digital objects themselves.

Europeana Creative is a new and exciting open data project and online portal providing access to more than 30 million digitized cultural heritage objects from Europe’s libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. It aims to facilitate the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage content and associated metadata. The project was launched at the end of February 2013 at the Austrian National Library in Vienna and will run for 30 months. 26 partners from 14 European countries with diverse backgrounds are contributing to the project. These include content providing institutions with world famous collections, creative industry hubs and organizations, the tourism and education sectors, living labs, software developers and multimedia experts, as well as think tanks.

Partners will be developing a number of pilot applications focused on design, tourism, education and social networks. Building on these pilots, a series of open innovation challenges will be launched with entrepreneurs from the creative industries to identify, incubate and spin off more viable projects into the commercial sector.

Europeana Creative

Link to video