Europeana Cloud

eCloud

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.