Publishing guide

The Europeana Publishing Guide is a resource for data partners who share material on the Europeana website. It outlines the minimum metadata requirements for having your data incorporated into the Europeana website.  It brings all the existing information into one place and outlines the criteria for submission of metadata to the Europeana website. It is intended to help aggregators and data partners share their data, become fully standardised and interoperable, if desired, and to improve the Europeana website in a uniform and consistent way. We will work with you to make sure that your datasets meet the publication criteria - because good data gives audiences a better experience and a greater connection with your collections.

The Publishing Guide builds on the Europeana Publishing Framework (EPF). The EPF goes beyond minimum metadata requirements for data publication in the Europeana website by addressing the quality of the metadata (through Tiers A, B, and C) and the quality of the content. It introduces four tiers of criteria for content (through Tiers 1, 2, 3 and 4) by taking into account not just the quality of the content, but also the selected rights statement. Because copyright restrictions often prevent the public from using, sharing, and creatively engaging with digital collections, we encourage data providers to use rights statements that allow reuse where possible. The greater openness of the content you allow, the higher content tier can the provided object achieve, meaning it can benefit audiences in a more significant way, as we outline here.

The Publishing Guide includes recommendations to help data partners increase the quality of their data from the lowest to the highest tiers, in order to achieve many of the following benefits: findability, web traffic increase, use in collections and exhibitions, reuse in partnerships, apps or services, and also by the creative industry. These criteria have been designed to help data partners to understand what is required to ensure that their digital collections are always considered to be accurate, findable and usable by our audiences. 

The acceptance criteria are also applied to legacy material (material already published on the Europeana website). This means data quality will be improved and metadata which is not compliant with the criteria may be removed. We will consult any affected data partners to manage and implement this over time, with the aim of ensuring a consistent improvement in data quality.

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