Europeana Business Plan 2014: feedback welcome

Europeana, the online portal providing access the Europe’s cultural heritage, held its Annual General Meeting on 2 December 2013, followed by the Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) conference. During these events two key plans for the future of Europeana were presented: the Europeana Business Plan for 2014, and the Strategy for 2015-2020. Feedback is now asked from everyone interested in helping to shape the future direction and priorities of Europeana.

Under the motto ‘Be bold. Be inspired’ Europeana focuses on five key elements for change in their 2015-2020 strategy:

  1. Shift from portal to platform
  2. Improve data quality
  3. Support the public domain
  4. Enable re-use
  5. Discoverability

These choices will increase the possibilities for users to interact with and build tools on the data: the main focus will be on stimulating further distribution of data, instead of on aggregation. Tim Sherratt of the National Library of Australia recently wrote an interesting background article on what such a shift from a portal to a platform entails. The complete presentation on the Europeana strategy for 2015-2020 is available here.

europeana_bp2014

For 2014 Europeana has drafted the following Business Plan, outlining the way in which they will manage the transition towards the new strategy. The plan defines twelve key objectives for 2014, including the promotion of the needs of cultural institutions in the upcoming EU copyright reform as well as stimulating data interoperability and reuse.

Now is your chance to give feedback! As Europeana asks on their blog:

Is there anything major missing? Do you agree with the direction we’re taking, moving from a portal to a platform, and from a focus on aggregation to distribution? Do you agree with our 12 objectives for 2014? Do our Key Performance Indicators make sense to you?

You can send your feedback until 17 December through the Europeana blog.