EuropeanaLocal works with the EDL Foundation to establish efficient and sustainable processes through which local and regional institutions can easily make their content available to Europeana during and after the project, adopting and promoting the use of its infrastructures, tools and standards, OAI-PMH repositories and Europeana Metadata Application Profiles initially, but moving forward to semantic web technologies later.

EuropeanaLocal builds upon existing multiplier networks of local institutions to bring together a consortium that represents 27 countries with broad ranging experience of the cultural sector, digital libraries, standards and aggregation services. EuropeanaLocal will make available to Europeana more than 20 million items. The expected results include the establishment of a network of regional repositories that are highly interoperable with Europeana, an integrated Europeana-EDLocal prototype service and the development of thematic areas for Europeana services which integrate content from both the national and the local/regional level.

However, there is a pressing need, not least in order to achieve Europeana’s 2010 content targets, to also make available the enormous amount of digital content provided by Europe’s cultural institutions at local and regional level alongside that held at national level and by doing so, to extend the institutional base of content providers to involve more extensively Europe’s network of museums and archives as well as libraries. Such a process will bring together and link up heterogeneously sourced content which is complementary in terms of themes, location and time, making it possible to establish integrated services with greater richness and complexity. Such a development will also add value for users by linking the digital content brought on stream through EuropeanaLocal with content of local and regional relevance held by national level institutions. These are the primary and overarching goals of EuropeanaLocal.

In this context, the ways in which Europeana interacts with the semantic and technical infrastructure being developed for the Semantic Web are highly relevant, both in terms of identifying which Semantic Web activities need to be considered in terms of standards and interoperability and which are relevant to implementation e.g. the Resource Description Framework RDF, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS).

In general, the project will involve the establishment of a harvestable network of OAI-PMH compliant metadata repositories, aggregating content at a level which makes sense in terms of the diverse demographics and digital content holdings of Europe’s municipalities, regions and localities and which complements the existing and planned Europeana network.

For the Europeana interface to be fully usable and to offer an attractive range of services, the data that cultural heritage institutions currently hold in proprietary databases needs to be made available for harvesting via the OAI-PMH protocol.  This will be the main line of approach of EuropeanaLocal.

A key goal of EuropeanaLocal is to adopt, as well as make important contributions in a number of these key domains (libraries, museums, archives and audio/visual archives).