Spaces of possibility for the creative re-use of Europeana’s content

Europeana Space aims to increase and enhance the creative industries’ use of digital cultural content and Europeana by delivering a range of resources to support their engagement.

The use of content is still limited by factors including the issue of IPR status and the need for robust business models that demonstrate the potential for exploitation of available content.

In addressing these problems, Europeana Space brings together high-level expertise from the European creative industries, technology-based enterprises, the cultural heritage sector and higher education.

Objectives

Europeana Space will create new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative industries based upon Europe’s rich digital cultural resources.

It will provide an open environment for the development of applications and services based upon digital cultural content. The use of this environment will be fostered by a wide programme of promotion, dissemination and replication of the Best Practices developed within the project.

Europeana Space addresses three key drivers of creative empowerment:

Ensuring access to digital cultural content, with a particular focus on the Europeana content eco-system, via the Technical Space, a technical framework consisting of an ICT-based infrastructure and associated tools
Providing guidelines, tools and methods for managing IPR, clearing copyright and exchanging open content, via the Content Space
Fostering creative entrepreneurship in the Innovation Space, an environment for exploitation of content, applications and services, supporting creative enterprises (particularly SMEs) through product development, incubation and identification of routes to market.

In addition, Europeana Space will create six thematic Pilots to showcase scenarios developed in this environment.

Europeana Space is an open network of organisations, ready to share expertise and knowledge resources to create a vast open innovation eco-system. To this end, Europeana Space will welcome any new member that shares our mission to empower Europe’s creative industries.

Action plan

The project lasts for 36 months and consists of six work-packages. The work-packages are:

WP1, Project Management
WP2, Technical Space: Infrastructure and tools for content access, use and storage
WP3, Content Space: Rights management for creative exploitation of Europeana content
WP4, Europeana Space Scenarios: development of Pilots in the six thematic areas
WP5, Innovation Space: Valorisation and exploitation in the Creative Industries
WP6, Communication, dissemination and sustainability

The Pilots

Europeana Space will develop six experimental Pilots which will explore different scenarios for the use of digital cultural content to benefit the fields of education, research, leisure and tourism. The Pilots are:

The six Pilot applications will deliver demonstrable results that will be presented for further experimentation through a dedicated programme of hackathons and incubated for exploitation by the creative industry.

The Pilots will share a common methodology and a framework for monitoring, validating, promoting and exploiting Pilots’ deliverables.

Pilot results will be integrated into the Europeana Labs.

Stakeholders and User

The two primary stakeholder groups of the Europeana Space project are also its primary user groups and all together form the project’s Network of Common Interest. They are:

The cultural institutions, which own and manage digital cultural curated content and wish to develop and possibly monetise their assets into creative products.
The creative enterprises, which have technological expertise and software platforms and need content to develop competitive products to be brought to market.

The project will also engage with a wide-ranging secondary group of stakeholders: larger industries in the creative sector, individual creators and artists, education sector, research, cultural institutions, tourist industry.

Download the Factsheet of the project (PDF, 406 Kb)