Three Year Europeana Cloud Project Gets Underway

The full title of the project is: “Europeana Cloud: Unlocking Europe’s Research via The Cloud”.
From LIBER (Assoc. of European Research Libraries):

On the 3^rd of March project participants representing libraries, research infrastructures, developers, publishers and researchers gathered to discuss, workshop, brainstorm and network.
Europeana Executive Director, Jill Cousins, opened the meeting by introducing the Europeana ecosystem and outlining the drivers and motivations for establishing a cloud based service for Europeana.
The project coordinator, Alastair Dunning, followed this by outlining the work of the project, its stakeholders and the challenges that need to be addressed over the course of the next 3 years.
The main aim of the meeting was to encourage interaction and discussion between the project partners, many of whom had not worked together before. Several workshops took place over the course of the 2 days, exploring barriers to  research, information access and collaboration, identifying solutions to these barriers, scoping the content that should be made available in Europeana Cloud, as well the technical requirements of such an infrastructure.

Read the Complete Blog Post
From the Europeana Cloud Web Site

Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators.
Lasting from 2013 to 2015, 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. Content providers and aggregators across the European information landscape urgently need a cheaper, more sustainable infrastructure that is capable of storing both metadata and content.
Researchers require a digital space where they can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe’s digitised content. Europeana needs to get closer to the target of 30 million items by 2015. Europeana Cloud meets these needs.

Read the Europeana Cloud Description of Work Document (PDF)
Review a List of Project Partners

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