Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network 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:
- 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;
- To create a cloud based infrastructure capable of delivering cost-efficient content and metadata storage for stakeholders across Europe;
- To understand and incorporate the legal, strategic and economic issues of a cloud-based system for content for cultural heritage institutions and domain aggregators;
- To achieve a broad consensus among European content aggregators and research networks on the advantages of a cloud based solution;
- To develop a digital platform, named Europeana Research, to discover and use Europeana research content;
- 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 digitized content as well.
In Europeana Cloud, DCU is leading the Work Package responsible for Assessing Researcher Needs in the Cloud and Ensuring Community Engagement, which will be responsible for:
- The identification and definition of the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities that will be supported via the Europeana Cloud
- The development of an effective research content strategy for Europeana, based on an evidence-based account of usefulness of Europeana and The European Library resources for research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- The improvement of the understanding of digital tools, research processes and content used in the Humanities and Social Sciences, thus informing the development of tools and aggregation of content in the Europeana Cloud
- The active engagement of the Humanities and Social Sciences research communities in establishing user requirements for the development of Europeana Cloud
Original location: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-ecloud
