We’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new European Commission funded project, DM2E – Digital Manuscripts to Europeana. DM2E will focus on the development of a suite of Linked Data tools that will enable more libraries and archives to provide digital content to Europeana – Europe’s largest cultural heritage portal. Funding has also been allocated for the development of tools that will enable innovative re-use of Europeana data in teaching and research contexts.

The software to be developed will allow for the contextualisation and linking of vast cultural heritage data sets drawn from some of Europe’s most prominent memory institutions. This will in turn allow scholars, students and the wider public to interact with with cultural objects and their associated metadata in innovative ways.

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, highlights the importance of the project for the teaching and research communities that reuse the data made available through Europeana:

“DM2E’s development of tools helps content providers to integrate and enrich their data with Europeana for re-use by scholars, teachers and students; and digital humanities developers to build applications best suited to the needs of scholars. The project is therefore key to facilitation work of Europeana in opening up access to our cultural heritage in new and exciting ways.”

The project will be led by Professor Stefan Gradmann from Humboldt University with community and dissemination work to be led by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The technical development will be based on an exemplary set of digitised content provided by some of Europe’s leading cultural heritage institutions such as Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Deutsches Textarchiv and Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

In line with the recent Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, all contributing institutions have agreed to make their metadata available under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication tool (CC-0) which will make it easier to reuse in diverse contexts.