DIGITAL MANIFESTATION OF EUROPEAN CULTURE: EXPLORING
EUROPEANA
*Huma Shafiq
Student, Department of Library & Information Science
University of Kashmir, Hazratbal, Srinagar-190006
Email: huma.msgr14@gmail.com
**Uzma Qadri
Assistant Librarian, Allama Iqbal Library
University of Kashmir, Hazratbal, Srinagar-190006
Email: uzmaqadri10@gmail.com
***Mudasir Khazer
Research Scholar, Department of Library & Information Science
University of Kashmir, Hazratbal, Srinagar-190006
Email: mudasir1234@gmail.com
Abstract
Traditional cultural assets are recognized as immensely valuable treasures of knowledge that
adds to the knowledge domain. These assets provide important links to our origin, history,
culture and tradition which reveal the rich historical background of any nation or civilization.
Various initiatives have been taken at global level for preserving and managing cultural
heritage in both tangible and intangible formats. Many Digital Libraries and heritage
repositories have been designed and made available providing systematic approach to digital
assets associated with relevant metadata for retrieval across system. One such step for
preserving cultural heritage in Europe is Europeana. It enables people to explore the digital
resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. It promotes
discovery and networking opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share
in and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage. Ideas and
inspiration can be found within the millions of items in Europeana. More than 2200
institutions
have
contributed
to
Europeana.
The British
Library in
London,
the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris are featured in Europeana as their
assembled collections allow you to explore Europe's history from ancient times to the modern
day. The present paper makes an attempt to explore the wealth of cultural resources available
through Europeana by analyzing its features through online survey.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The bequest of physical artifacts and impalpable ascribes of a group or society is what we
simply call as Cultural Heritage. These artifacts and ascribes are inherited from past
generations and maintained in present so that our future generations will be prosperous owing
to its strong bonds to posterity. Heritage is considered to be a sustainable resource, which
should not only be perceived as a national inheritance, but also as an integral part of the
universal human endowment (Aita, n.d.). Integral part of universal human endowment
definitely predicts the importance of sustaining our cultural heritage. Thus, before our
heritage becomes endangered, steps need to be put in place to preserve both tangible and
intangible cultural assets. Various initiatives have already been taken at the global level
towards this endeavour and Europeana is one among them. European Parliament (2007)
defines Europeana as a digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to
the European cultural heritage (as cited by Escande, 2009). Europeana provides access to
thousands of digitized items throughout Europe including museum objects, paintings,
archives, books, films etc. It is a non-profit initiative owned by European Foundation. The
catalyst for Europeana was a letter sent by Jacques Chirac, President of France, together with
the premiers of Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and Hungary 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
project was initialised with the recommendations present in the letter and thus, resulted in the
launch of the prototype on 20 November, 2008. In the beginning, it gave access to 4.5 million
digital objects (Europeana, 2013). At present, it is providing access to almost 29 million
objects and is growing as the time passes.
1.2 ANALYZING EUROPEANA
Europe has a diverse culture depicting varied forms of music, painting, literature, sculpture,
film, architecture, etc. This vast and rich diversity of Europe’s cultural heritage is being
preserved by the European Foundation in the form of a web portal, Europeana, giving the
digital reflections of European culture enabling people to explore various archives, museums,
libraries and audio-visual collections digitally. It promotes discovery and networking
opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share in and be inspired by the
rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage. It provides access to the millions of
items inspiring and promoting ideas among the art lovers including hundreds and thousands
of images (drawings, maps, paintings, pictures and photos of museum objects), videos ( TV
broadcasts, films and newsreels), sounds (music and spoken words from tapes, radio
broadcasts and discs) and texts (letters, newspapers, books, archival papers and diaries). It
also includes some world famous topics and objects like the drawings of “Leonardo da
Vinci”, Isaac Newton’s book about the “Laws of Motion”, Johannes Vermeer’s painting of
the “Girl With A Pearl Earring” or objects about the “Berlin Wall”. More than 2200
institutions from 36 countries provide data to Europeana among which some top data
providing countries are Germany followed by France, Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. Fig. 1
shows a list of the top 15 countries providing data to Europeana:
Source: http://www.pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/content
Fig. 1
1.21 Searching Europeana
Europeana can b searched in four ways, general search, specific search, phrase search and
refined search.
1.211 General Search
It is the simple search interface provided by the Europeana to its users. Users need to know
the Who, What, Where or When of the object they need to find and thus, type these words
into the search box.
Source: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=Isaac+Newton
Fig. 2
The user gets large number of results while searching through this search type as highlighted
in the above Fig. 2. If the user needs the particular information, he needs to switch to another
type of searching, specific search.
1.212 Specific Search
An advanced search interface used to narrow down the search results by using the same Who,
What, Where and When key questions. In this case, a user can narrow his/her search with the
arrow to the right of ‘Search All fields’ and selecting a category: ‘Titles, Creators, Subjects,
Dates/Periods, Places’. Then enter the search term and hit ‘Search’. Alternatively, a user can
enter the key question (who/what/where/when) followed by a colon (:) followed by the
name/words from title/place/period or date, respectively.
Source: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=who%3A+Isaac+Newton
Fig. 3
Here, the number of results reduces from 1223 to 706 as seen in the Fig. 3. These search
interfaces also have support for different spellings and multi-lingual queries.
1.213 Phrase Search
Phrase searching is possible in Europeana. It can be done in two ways, either by putting
quotation marks around the phrase (e.g. "art nouveau") or by using Boolean operator “AND”
in between the keywords (e.g. art AND nouveau). For excluding any word, Boolean operator
“NOT” is used (e.g. Auguste NOT Renoir).
1.214 Refined Search
After initial search has been done results can be narrowed down with the ‘Refine your
results’ functions. He/she can add another term by which the results can be further narrowed
down. The user can also filter the search results by various ways like media type, language,
date, country, provider and rights.
Source: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=Auguste
Fig. 4
The highlighted portion shown in the Fig. 4 helps the users refine their search results
according to their requirements reducing the number of results to a large extent.
1.22 Exploring Europeana
Apart from the above mentioned standard ways of searching, Europeana offers its users some
alternate ways to explore and navigate through its collection. The users can come across the
rich and diverse heritage of Europe in many ways. Its virtual exhibitions help the users to
discover and learn more about specific themes. With extensive curatorial information that
guides through the themes, the virtual exhibitions are displayed on the image carousel of
Europeana's landing page, and can be also found in the 'Explore' tab at the top of the page. It
can also be explored through the latest content contributed to the portal from their partner
museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries. There are over 2200 institutions that
provide data to Europeana. Its collection can also be accessed via those data providers.
Another way of exploring it is through time. It provides an interactive timeline which lets the
user to see items categorized by date. Map provides one more means to explore Europeana
where the users can view their results on a map. Here, only geo-location possibilities can be
explored thus, displaying the results for some of the search terms only.
1.23 Other Features in Europeana
Europeana also provides many other features such as connecting to the original source of the
material searched ensuring its authenticity. It provides some search features like stemming as
in case of Google while typing the search term and also suggests an alternative spelling for
spelling errors. Rights and licence information is available below each item’s thumbnail
image.
This multi-lingual portal provides information in 31 different languages allowing the users to
translate item detail in their known language. Users can share various items on various social
networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many more. They can also register to
the portal through “My Europeana” section which provides them a personal space in
Europeana. Here, a user can create alerts in order to be updated on any particular topic of
their interest. They can also add their favourite items under certain tags which they can access
anytime in their accounts. For later viewing, various items can be saved to the account.
(Europeana.eu, 2013)
1.3 CONCLUSION
Europeana is one of the leading cultural heritage portals from Europe opening a doorway to
an ocean of digital collection from the museums, archives, libraries and audio-visual
collection of Europe. It is presently providing access to approximately 29 million items
having great cultural value and these figures are increasing day-by-day. Europe has taken a
great step towards saving and sustaining their cultural heritage for the future. Taking the
lesson from Europeans, every nation must work towards maintaining and preserving their
culture for the coming future. Culture as a heritage is a very broad term which not only
includes the material aspects like monuments, objects, buildings etc but also covers the living
heritage incarnated in values, beliefs, social practices etc. No nation is having any scarcity of
such cultural heritage but most of our ethnic values are prone to the threat of becoming
extinct. Once these extinguish, these won’t be available for our future generations. Before
such a time comes, each nation (even if at the individual levels of a person in order to give it
a beginning) must take the responsibility of preserving the culture. This European cultural
heritage can be treated as a boost for every heritage lover to generate ideas and provide the
inspiration for new ethnic manifestations.
REFERENCES
Aita, H. E. M. A. (n.d.). Cultural heritage. Focus, 1. Retrieved from
http://www.undp.ps/en/newsroom/publications/pdf/focus/04v1.pdf
Escande, A. (2009). Europeana Today and Tomorrow. BAAC Conference-Vilnius. Retrieved
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http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/869571/874181/BAAC_Europeana_AuberyEscan
de.pdf
Europeana. (2013). Retrieved from the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europeana
Europeana.eu. (2013). Retrieved from
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/