| europeana-cloud |
Description |
Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, submitted under Objective 2.1.a and coordinated
by the Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana
and its aggregators. Europeana Cloud will provide new content, new metadata, a new
linked storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform -
Europeana Research. Content providers and aggregators, across the European information
landscape, urgently need a cheaper, more sustainable infrastructure that is capable
of storing both metadata and content. Researchers require a digital space where they
can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe's digitised content. Europeana
needs to get closer to the target of 30 million items by 2015. Europeana Cloud meets
these needs.
The key objectives of Europeana Cloud are:
1. To provide access, at Europeana, to 1.1m new metadata records and 5m research focussed
items from across European Universities, libraries, data centres and publishers;
2. To create a cloud based infrastructure capable of delivering cost-efficient content
and metadata storage for
stakeholders across Europe;
3. To understand and incorporate the legal, strategic and economic issues of a
cloud-based system for content for cultural heritage institutions and domain aggregators;
4. To achieve a broad consensus among European content aggregators and research networks
on the advantages of a cloud based solution;
5. To develop a digital platform, named Europeana Research, to discover and use Europeana
research
content;
6. Via this cloud to provide tools and services for researchers that permit innovative
research that exploits digitised content in Europeana. This is a vital project for
the Europeana network of content providers
and aggregators, moving to an infrastructure that can deal not just with descriptive
metadata but actual digitised content as well. |
