Europeana.eu, Europe’s digital library that gives access to collections from all domains of the cultural sector: libraries, archives, audiovisual collections (both television and film) and museums, is threatened with severe budget cuts. From 2015 onwards, Europeana’s funding is to come from the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). In February 2013, a drastic budget cut for this scheme was proposed for broadband and digital services from 9 billion euros to just 1 billion (see: http://euobserver.com/news/118998). A loss of funding for Europeana will negatively affect its whole ecosystem, meaning the network of regional, national and pan-European aggregators like EFG – The European Film Gateway, which provide digitised cultural content to Europeana. The European Union currently supports this network of aggregators via project funding and without it, the European Film Gateway and its follow-up project EFG1914 would not exist. As member of the Europeana Foundation and initiator of The European Film Gateway and EFG1914, ACE fully supports the #AllezCulture Campaign to defend Europeana’s funding.
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Why Europeana matters
Europeana stands for the democratisation of access to culture, helping the communities and citizens of Europe to understand their past and to appreciate cross-cultural differences. It aligns cultural data from the participating institutions across Europe and promotes European culture throughout the world.
Today, Europeana offers standardized data of over 2,200 organisations, covering all European countries and 29 European languages. 27 million digitised objects including books, paintings, films and audio objects are accessible. The EFG and EUscreen function as important aggregators for the audiovisual content in Europeana. So far, users can view over 181,000 videos with many more to come over the next years.
On a political level, Europeana’s makes the voice of memory institutions heard. Thanks to Europeana’s advocacy work, current EU copyright legislation is put under pressure to become more flexible, e.g. to allow for an easier online publication of archival material. Without Europeana supported by the network of partners, the Orphan Works Directive would not have passed.
#AllezCulture !
ACE encourages all film heritage institutions to express their support. Please visit Europeana’s #AllezCulture campaign website to see how you can help.
Download the fact sheet: Support for Europeana and its ecosystem in the Connecting Europe Facility
Download the AllezCulture leaflet: Europeana – The case for funding
Show your support and sign the online petition “Keep Europe’s culture open to everyone online“