News Release

Tecnalia contributes to enhancing Europeana, the great European digital library

Business Announcement

Elhuyar Fundazioa

Tecnalia, through its Information and Interaction Systems Unit, is taking part, together with other 23 partners from ten European countries, in ASSETS (Advanced Service Search and Enhancing Technological Solutions for the European Digital Library), a project co-financed by the European Commission within the CIP-Policy Support Programme and whose goal is to improve the usability of Europeana.

Europeana is a freely accessible European digital library, inaugurated on 20th November 2008, bringing together contributions from recognised cultural institutions of the 27 member states of the European Union. Its collections include books, films, paintings, newspapers, sound archives, maps, manuscripts and other archives. At present the European Digital Library stores 14 million digital cultural content items in various formats (text, images, video and audio) and aspires to become a space that reflects the diversity of Europe; an archive of its history, of its collective memory.

The ASSETS project aims to create a group of added value services for searching, navigating and accessing and which will enhance the accessibility to contents and the usability of Europeana. These services will be validated at a large scale in the context of the real use of this digital library. The Italian company, Engineering, is leading the project, which is to last two years and has a total budget of 5.3 million euros.

The Tecnalia Unit for Information and Interaction Systems is responsible of the design and development of the graphical user interface, especially focused on undertaking searches in large multimedia collections. The aim is to improve the usability of the Europeana portal through advanced web interfaces, providing intelligent access with the same paradigm for different kinds of archives, as well as an interactive search based on the preferences of the users, their past activity and their decisions about the relevance of the results.

Novel tools

Generally speaking, ASSETS will enable the handling and management of new kinds of archives (audio, video, 3D) within the portal and without accessing the original sources. It will also help the users to create their own digital contents (either original or combined with previously existing ones) and include them in the portal. Finally, various APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) will be developed in order to enable the Europeana resources to be incorporated into other applications.

ASSETS will also work on drawing up a set of recommendations, guidelines and good practices concerning the technology adaptation, and service roll out strongly contributing to the promotion of the standards and specifications addressed in Europeana, and paving the way for an increased interoperability.

Various content providers (ANSC, Liberis, HASC, DIAS, Albéniz, UNESCO, F-Micheletti) are also present in the ASSETS consortium. Their contributions will increase the multimedia content available in the Europeana portal.

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More information at: www.assets4europeana.eu


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