Portal for European heritage available online (sort of)
The European Union’s Europeana portal project was launched yesterday, offering user access to a wealth of cultural heritage content, harvested from the continent’s museums, archives and libraries.
There has been some scepticism about the long-term success of the project, especially in regards to its sustainability model and it’s ability to deflect users away from Google - a problem for any budding portal.
However, two recent events might changes the sceptics’ views.
Firstly, is the overwhelming popularity of the site on its first day - 10m hits, according to the website, with the unpleasant side effect that the site will be down until mid-December.
Recent comments from Google suggest they might be interested on working with Europeana, a partnership that would definelty add to the portal’s impact. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
Open up as many channels as possible for resource discovery
There’s a lot of digital content out there, and so the battle to get your particular project noticed and used is a tough one.
One particular project that has dealt with this is the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets project, a multi-partner project led by the University of Southampton. The resource will not just have its own website but numerous means of access.
* The principal content will be delivered via JSTOR
* Metadata on individual pamphlets held by each partner institution will be held in the respective University Library catalogues, with links to the items on JSTOR
* COPAC - The merged online catalogue for major UK research libraries will hold the metadata for each digitised pamphlet, again with links
* Google Search - Metadata will be uploaded to Google for incorporation into the search engine
So even if a user does not directly visit the full resource on JSTOR, there are numerous other doors by which they may gain entrance to the resource
