A new way to explore cultural heritage
The Europeana website offers people multiple ways to explore the cultural heritage content shared by institutions throughout Europe online - from inspiring editorial (blogs, galleries and exhibitions) to entity pages which bring together content on a particular topic, figure or time period. With the creation of dedicated ‘Organisation pages’ on the website, audiences are now able to browse and discover content by the specific organisation which shared the data with Europeana. The organisations can be browsed through an alphabetical list on the website or found via the main search by typing the name of a specific organisation.
The list currently contains 2,241organisations identified by Europeana, linking to 56,270,479 items. These organisations are the cultural heritage institutions and aggregators who have contributed data to Europeana, or in some cases the projects which supported the data publication activities.
Promoting collections and institutions
In addition to offering a new way of browsing content, the development of the organisation pages means that institutions who share data with Europeana each have their own, dedicated page showcasing the content they provided. These new pages highlight the institutions who provide data to Europeana more prominently, and will allow us to promote their collections. The pages can also be used by cultural heritage institutions to develop, support and affirm their digital presence on the Web, and showcase the efforts they have undertaken to digitise and share their collections with Europeana.
Future plans
The organisation pages as released now are the first iteration. We will undertake many improvements over the next few months to curate the underlying data and to improve the experience of this new feature for audiences and cultural heritage institutions alike. We will make each organisation's individual page more user friendly and improve its navigation.
One of Europeana’s objectives is to improve users' multilingual experience of the Europeana website and the data it offers access to. In this first iteration, the names of the organisations are displayed in English where available in order to make it more widely accessible to our international audience. English is used by Europeana as part of its multilingual strategy as, a ‘bridge for translating all other languages to and from’, and in coming iterations organisation names will be displayed in their original language (using sometimes different alphabets) next to their English version.
Give us feedback
If you have published data in Europeana, you can help us to ensure that all organisations are well represented in the Europeana website. Your feedback is essential - to indicate problems or errors, or make suggestions for improvements.
We are aware of instances where a cultural heritage institution that has published data in Europeana does not yet have an organisation page, or alternatively, of pages where the quality of the descriptive information varies (for instance wrong names or translations). If you share data with Europeana, please use the user feedback button on the Europeana website (a small, blue round icon which appears on the lower right hand side of the screen) to tell us anything you see that is odd, wrong, or not clear when you look at the organisation pages. Your feedback will help us improve these pages and bring benefits to the cultural heritage institutions who share their data with us - and the audiences who enjoy them.