Europeana Inside and its Hungarian implementation

Abstract

It is the aim of the Europeana project launched in 2008 to unite the digital heritage of EU member states into a single portal which will be accessible for a wide range of internet users. Since the start of the project thousands of cultural institutions contributed to the content of the portal, from large, internationally recognized institutions to small regional collections. Since the building of thematic aggregators was accompanied by several technical and organizational problems – which came from the human resource requirements of aggregation – the need came up for increasing both integration and automation. As a result, the Europeana Inside project was born, which attempts to involve the vendors of systems for integrated public collections into the construction of Europeana. The main objective of the project is to develop a common, open-source-based software component, the so-called Europeana Connection Kit (ECK), which allows for a closer integration of current and future integrated systems into the Europeana network, thus making a greater degree of automation possible.