The organisation pages on the Europeana website bring together every item published by a cultural heritage institution on the Europeana website. Following this guide you will be able to curate an organisation page in order to be representative of what the collection of this institution is about and for what masterpieces or highlights this institution is well known. This guide is showing you step by step how you can turn the automatically and randomly compiled organisation page for a cultural heritage institution into a page that represents that institution in the best way possible.
How to get started
Before you can work on an organisation page, you need to have a Europeana user account.
If you don’t already have one, get your Europeana user account now.
Once you are signed up, please send your username to henning.scholz@europeana.eu. He will make sure that you get the right permissions for you to work on an organisation page.
Once you receive the confirmation email from Henning that your account has been set up correctly, you are ready to start.
Log in and choose an organisation
With your username and password you log in to the Europeana website. When entering the Europeana website, you click on ‘LOG IN / JOIN’ in the upper right hand corner of the website.
This will take you to the screen to log in.
Once you are logged in, instead of ‘LOG IN / JOIN’ in the upper right hand corner of the website you see ‘MY PROFILE’. This is an indicator for you that you are using the Europeana website as a signed up user.
Next step is to choose the organisation page you would like to work on. You have several ways to find and select one. One option is to click on COLLECTIONS in the menu of the Europeana website.
The page you are seeing then lists many different collections. Scroll down to the point where it says ‘Organisations’ and then click on ‘Show more organisations’. This will take you to the list of all organisations we have data. Please wait a moment as due to the many thousands of organisations it will take a moment for the page to load. The best way to find the organisation you are looking for is to search on the website for the name, e.g. by using the keyboard combination Ctrl+F on a Windows computer and Cmd+F on a Mac. You can search for the organisation in its original language and in English. Once you found the organisation, click on the name of the organisation and it will take you to the organisation page.
If you can not find the organisation in the list but you know there is data from that organisation on the Europeana website, please use another approach to see if there is an organisation page. For this you need to go to any item page with an object from that organisation.
Looking at the Milkmaid, for example, you can see in a grey pill the term ‘Rijksmuseum’. This is the name of the organisation, which takes you to the organisation page of the Rijksmuseum. There may be cases where you enter an item page where the name of the organisations is not in a grey pill. If this is the case (an example of how this looks is shown below where the name of the organisation - Nordfriisk Instituut - is not displayed in a grey pill, please use the feedback button of the Europeana website to let us know that there is no organisation entity extracted from the metadata record. In such cases there is no organisation page and you would need to choose another organisation to work on. One note, at the time of writing, you need to log out from the Europeana website to submit your feedback via the feedback button.
Work on the details of an organisation
For this part of the guide we look at the organisation page for the National Library of France (BnF). Reason is that for basic information, the profile for BnF is the most complete. When you are logged in to the Europeana website, the organisation card for BnF looks like this.
In the top left you see the logo. Below is the name of the organisation in its original language (French). Below is the name of the organisation in English. Below the English name is the description of the organisation (at the time of writing this is not very meaningful for BnF as it only duplicates the English name). Below these 4 elements you see four buttons that you can click on. The two buttons in the middle take you to the website of the organisation (WEBSITE) or allow you to share what you see via social media (SHARE). The button ‘LEARN MORE’ opens the below pop-up.
In addition to the name in original language and the name in English, this learn-more pop-up also shows the acronym of the organisation, its country, the city and the URL of the website of the organisation.
If you look at the learn-more pop-up for the organisation you work on and any of the information here is wrong or missing, you can not edit it yourself but can only tell us to update it. The same is true for the logo of the organisation. If you would like to have the organisation logo uploaded to the Europeana website, you need to share it with us. We still work on a process and workflow to allow this information to be shared.
Now please go back to the main organisation page and again look at the basic information about the organisation.
The button on the right is called ‘EDIT’ and by clicking on it, you get another pop-up window where you can edit the description of the organisation. Please keep in mind that the character limit for a description is 240. If you experience this as too much of a limitation for you, please let us know.
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Editing the description.
When you see the pop-up, work on the description and when you are ready, click on ‘UPDATE COLLECTION’ to save the information to the Europeana website so it becomes available to all users of the website.
Note, at the time of writing this description update feature is still not working very smoothly. Once you click on ‘UPDATE COLLECTION’, it will for sure take a moment and if things work fine you see the update being applied. In some cases though you need to first close the pop-up and maybe even refresh the page to get the description update in place. I advise you to play a bit with this feature and let Henning know your experience, which will help to improve this feature.
The description is the only information you can directly edit and change via the Europeana website and this interface. All the other information is coming from our CRM system, where it is stored to have one single point of reference. Therefore, organisation names, website, etc needs to be udpated in the CRM. We are still working on the process to make it as easy as possible for you to share or update information for the other fields displayed on the Europeana website.
Bring highlights to the first page
Once you have updated the basic information or requested an update of the basic information from Europeana Foundation, it's time to look at the items shown on the first page of the organisation page you work on. The items on the first page are somehow randomised, but are certainly not representative of the collection of a particular organisation. It will not show the masterpieces or most important items an organisation is known for. You can change this, you can make the first page the shop window for this organisation, you can bring items to the top of the page that you want a user to see first, when looking at the collections. If you think about the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, you expect to see the Nightwatch at the top of the page. If you think about a big library, you expect a precious manuscript from their rare book collection on the top of the page.
Before you start working on this aspect of the organisation page, it helps to be prepared and have the list of items ready that you would like to bring to the top. It can be a maximum of 24 items, but it is also not a problem to only bring 5 or 10 highlights to the top. What is important to have in mind: the item you want to have at the very top of the page you need to pin last. The first item you pin will end up on the bottom of the page as number 24. As you also can not exceed 24 items, it really helps to have a list with all the 24 items, so you can work through this order in a structured way.
Another aspect you need to have in mind is that you don’t update the organisation page right away, but you create a curated collection in the back, that will then be applied to the organisation page, to fill the first page. While this sounds a bit abstract, it is best to start working on this, to see the process in practice.
Your starting point is the organisation page you want to work on. On this page you search for the item you would like to bring to the first page.
Click on the lens in the upper right corner of the page.
In my case I type in ‘rembrandt’, and hit return.
On the results page I now see a few images I would like to have on the top of the organisation page. Please try this out with items from the organisation you would like to showcase and search for them. Once you have found one or more items, you need to select them. You need to pin them to your curated collection. This works as follows.
If you are logged in to the Europeana website and you go with your mouse over an image of the result page like the above, you see a heart and a plus icon on the right of that image and a pin on the left. If you hover over the pin, it turns from grey to blue, indicating that you can click it now. Please click it. Maybe select another item and again click on the pin. At the moment you click on it, it seems that nothing has happened.
But if you now go back to your profile and look at the curated collections, you will see that there is a collection for this organisation and the items you pinned are included in the collection.
In order to see the full menu of the website, click on the arrow pointing to the left in the upper left corner of the page.
Then click on ‘MY PROFILE’ in the upper right corner of the page.
Then click on ‘Curated Collections’.
And then you should see all curated collections, named after the organisation that you are working on. You can now go back to the organisation page, search for more items and pin them until you have reached the limit of 24 items.
In case you have pinned an item by mistake, you can also unselect it and remove it from the collection by going to the item page of that item.
On every item page there is also the pin icon in between the preview of the item and the title of the object. If you click on it here, you see a pop-up that shows what entities this item belongs to. If you click on the pin next to Rijksmuseum and confirm with ‘UNPIN ITEM’ it will be removed from the curated collection of this organisation.
Publish the curated collection
To publish the curated collection and apply it to the organisation page, please wait for EF staff to take over. In a regular interval (tbd how often) EF staff will do the update and make sure the collection is published. If this does not happen after a while, don’t hesitate to contact henning.scholz@europeana.eu to investigate this case and help you to bring your collection live.
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