The Background (Norman Rodger, January 2014)

The University of Edinburgh, represented by Library and University Collections, is one of 35 partners in the Europeana Cloud Project, which is coordinated by The European Library. The project, which has a total budget of around 4.75 million euros, has just entered its second year and will run until January 2016.

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. The project came about in recognition of the fact that content providers and aggregators across the European information landscape need a cheaper, more sustainable infrastructure that is capable of storing both metadata and content. Similarly, researchers require a digital space where they can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe’s digitised content. Europeana Cloud aims meets these needs.

Our role in the project is principally to deliver digital content and we have already well exceeded our original target figure of 7,500, by submitting over 12,000 images. These will soon be available online through the Europeana website.

In addition we have hosted two workshops on the Legal and Economic aspects of the project and participated in two Expert Forums looking at how researchers could use Europeana to aid their work.

The Delivery (Scott Renton, February 2014)

The Digital Development and Projects and Innovation teams are pleased to announce that our main commitment to the Europeana Cloud project has now been fulfilled, and we have 12,431  CRC images across 16 datasets available in the Europeana repository. They’ve been harvested from the LUNA image service using OAI-PMH (harvesting), and the process has been, honestly, quite painless! There has been some development work to make the right information appear, but it’s always easier to let people get your stuff than to build something to send it to them. Crucially, the images on Europeana link back to LUNA, which will hopefully improve traffic to our collections.

The full set of images can be accessed here:  When you get in, individual datasets can be accessed with the following (user-friendly!) search terms… don’t enter the bit in brackets!

• europeana_collectionName:9200259* (Architectural Drawings)
• europeana_collectionName:9200260* (Hill and Adamson Calotypes)
• europeana_collectionName:9200261*  (Incunabula)
• europeana_collectionName:9200262* (David Laing Archive)
• europeana_collectionName:9200263* (New College)
• europeana_collectionName:9200264* (Oriental Manuscripts)
• europeana_collectionName:9200265* (Salvesen Whaling Expeditions)
• europeana_collectionName:9200266* (School of Scottish Studies Photographic Archive)
• europeana_collectionName:9200267* (Walter Scott Collection)
• europeana_collectionName:9200268* (Western Mediaeval Manuscripts)
• europeana_collectionName:9200269* (Shakespeare)
• europeana_collectionName:9200270* (Thomson-Walker Portraits of Medical Men)
• europeana_collectionName:9200271* (CRC Gallimaufry (Miscellaneous Images))
• europeana_collectionName:9200272* (Roslin Glass Slides)
• europeana_collectionName:9200273* (University of Edinburgh- People, Places and Events)
• europeana_collectionName:9200274* (Object Lessons Exhibition)

Also on Europeana are our Musical Instruments from the MIMEd, which were harvested for the MIMO project in 2011. You can see those here.

Thanks as ever to Norman Rodger and Stuart Lewis for steering the project from our perspective! There will be a chance for the insitutions that have submitted to Europeana Cloud to meet up and share their experiences at the AGM in Athens next month.

A Europeana Cloud image: Walter Scott’s The Abbot (Steel engraving by E.F. Finden from a drawing by H. Gastineau depicting a scene of Loch Leven).
This can be found at http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/8vr814
and http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/9200267/BibliographicResource_3000059119960_source.html?start=1&query=gastineau+leven&startPage=1&rows=12