Data partners are encouraged to provide direct links to media files. However, content from platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo or others, which can be embedded in Europeana, is also accepted. This exception applies to organisations that are hosting media on external platforms due to hosting limitations, when Europeana does not support the display of specific file formats (e.g. 3D models), or when copyright restrictions prevent direct online access to media.

To streamline the provision of embeddable resources, we have implemented EDM profile that utilises oEmbed, the de facto recognised standard for facilitating the embedding of content from one website on platforms like Europeana. The profile requires data providers to supply more than just a link to an oEmbed-compatible media page. This guide outlines the necessary information about embeddable web resources that must be included in EDM metadata to ensure seamless integration and proper display on Europeana.

Steps for providing oEmbed-compliant content as a web resource

• Step 1: Provide the embeddable resource as an edm:WebResource

• Step 2: Flag the WebResource as oEmbed compliant

• Step 3: Provide a thumbnail for the embeddable resource

• Step 4 (optional): Include a direct media representation of the same content

Each step includes a mapping example, showing how the provision evolves and builds on the previous step towards the final mapping. The same image hosted on Flickr is used throughout to illustrate the provision of embeddable media.

Step 1: Provide the embeddable resource as an edm:WebResource

Embeddable media can be either used as the main or secondary digital representation of the cultural object. In line with EDM Definitions and EDM Mapping Guidelines, this means embeddable resource SHOULD be supplied in:

• edm:isShownBy

• OR edm:hasView (if there is already an edm:isShownBy present)

The URI of the WebResource MUST be supplied as the oEmbed URL containing all required parameters to retrieve embeddable content and metadata about a specific resource.

Example:

Step 2: Flag the WebResource as oEmbed compliant

Connect the web resource containing an oEmbed URL to a resource of type svcs:Service using svcs:has_service property. The identifier of the Service MUST be the oEmbed endpoint.

Additionally:

• Indicate the edm:WebResource conforms to the oEmbed standard by using the dcterms:conformsTo property. The value of dcterms:conformsTo MUST be the URI with value https://oembed.com/

• The svcs:Service class SHOULD also have an rdfs:label property with the name of the service (e.g. “Flickr”, “Vimeo”, “YouTube”, “SoundCloud”, “Sketchfab” etc.)

Example:

Step 3: Provide a thumbnail for the embeddable resource

For embeddable content, Europeana cannot generate a thumbnail directly from the embedded resource. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you either:

• Supply an image in edm:object (currently the only reliable option)

• OR include the thumbnail_url parameter in the oEmbed service response (at the moment, Europeana cannot automatically extract the thumbnail_url from the oEmbed response and map it to edm:object, so providing edm:object is recommended)

Example:

Step 4 (optional): Include a direct media representation of the same content

In some cases, providers may wish to supply a “simple” media representation alongside the embeddable version of the same content. In such cases, the relationship between the “simple” and embeddable edm:WebResource SHOULD be established using the dcterms:isFormatOf property.

Example (we use the same image hosted on Flickr as in the previous steps. In this case, a traditional JPEG image is supplied as the primary representation and mapped to edm:isShownBy, while the embeddable Flickr image is provided as an additional, higher-resolution view in edm:hasView):

What happens during ingestion?

When providers supply embeddable media content following the steps described above, Europeana will also generate extra technical metadata (edm:type and ebucore:hasMimeType) from the provided oEmbed URL and add it to the provided webResource.