This page presents current and past use cases of platforms, apps, websites and other projects that have used the Europeana APIs in some way. This page can help you find inspiration for your next project using the data that we make available, or can give you insight into how others have used the Europeana APIs.

Current use cases

Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog

The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK) is a search engine that gives access to millions of books, magazines and other media from library and book trade catalogs worldwide. Developed by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT Library), KVK allows users to simultaneously search for content from several library catalogs, including from Europeana.

Gongu

Korean search platform users the Europeana APIs

Supported by the Korea Copyright Commission, Gongu is a Korean language search engine for cultural content. Through Gongu you can access digital objects and find out about their rights statements. Because Gongu has integrated the Europeana API, you can also discover related content from Europeana using this search engine.

Picryl

Find and use what you need most on the public domain

PICRYL is a search engine for public domain images, documents, music, and videos, with over 5 million public domain images, 1,000 of collections and 10,000 of locations all available on this single website.

Search, download, modify or create at your leisure. All content is free for commercial and non-commercial use, copyright free and with no attribution required.

PICRYL draws on a number of digitized public domain media sites, including Europeana. In just a few moments, you will discover vast collections of historical moments, public figures, famous places and events. And all for free.

Provided by: https://picryl.com/

On This Day

Discover and share images of events that happened on this day in history

On This Day, part of the CulturePics site, displays items relating to the current date in history from 1800 to the present day. Users can also choose a particular year or month.

This is a significantly upgraded version of tool originally written for Flickr Commons images. It now includes data Europeana, Imperial War Museums, as well as Flickr Commons.

The data has been harvested from providers using some custom php scripts to query respective APIs. Data is harmonised and stored in a local mySql database to allow more flexible retrieval on partial date matches.

jQuery plugins, including Masonry and Bootstrap Image Gallery (based on blueimp) are used to provide a rich, responsive, interactive experience, and social tools allow users to share particular dates or individual images.

The code is openly licensed.

Creative Commons Search

Locate and enjoy great content

CC Search helps users to find content they can share, use, and remix from multiple platforms, including Europeana.

It’s a simple but very effective gateway to a wide variety of search services such as Europeana, Flickr, Google Images and Wikimedia Commons (and many more besides).

So much more than a search engine, CC Search carefully curates search queries and then passes you straight to the interfaces you need. You can filter your searches on material that has, for example, a creative commons licence.

You can also install CC Search as a custom search engine in most browsers.

Ajapaik / Timepatch

Ajapaik (translated from Estonian to English as 'Timepatch') is a location based site inviting users to look around and add metadata to historical images. It also adds a social and competitive element, with points awarded for contributions made.

Ajapaik was a winner in the Europeana Creative Challenges and will be working to create location focussed challenges using carefully sourced imagery from Europeana. As a first step, a selection of early images of Paris have been added to coincide with the Europeana Tech conference in February 2015.

National Library of Ireland catalogue widget

This interface allows simultaneous search of many of the Library's catalogued collections and displays results from Europeana using a sidebar widget.

This interface allows simultaneous search of many of the Library's catalogued collections, including digitised material. A new feature is that results from Europeana are also returned for every search, using a sidebar widget. The widget shows six items from Europeana with an option to see the full search result on the Europeana portal. Results from the National Library's contributions to Europeana are filtered out to remove duplicates.

Past use cases

Full Text in Python (2019)

The new suite of Python script is developed by Ian Goodale from European Studies of the University of Texas. The tool assists you with searching and downloading full-text records from the Europeana Collections via the Europeana APIs. This is particularly useful if you would like to explore over 4 million historical newspapers from across Europe, currently available on Europeana platform.

Discover more and start using this unique tool!

Bulk Downloader (2017)

A collection of code snippets (mainly php) for working with the Europeana API. Get bulk downloads of specific subsets of items, including both their metadata and their associated media files, by using this application.

Europeana Bulk downloader on Github

KNReise (2017)

Supported by KNReise and the Arts Council Norway, this map-demo service displays the artworks from the Europeana 280 campaign by country of origin. Discover Europe's shared cultural heritage using this application!

To learn more about this solution, take a look at other maps. All code is freely available on GitHub.

EEXCESS Moodle Plugin (2016)

Using the Moodle plugin, you can enhance your lessons or homework with content and references to scientific or cultural resources.

The EEXCESS prototype tools serve as recommendation tools, delivering personally tailored recommendations from cultural and scientific databases without having to explicitly search for this content, integrated into web browsers and content management systems. All code is available openly licensed and via GitHub.

Using the Moodle plugin, you can enhance your lessons or homework with content and references to scientific or cultural resources, such as Europeana, EconBiz (economic literature), Mendeley (scientific papers). EEXCESS Moodle plug-in consists of two components: a Moodle server plug-in which allows you to read EEXCESS content, and a plug-in for the Moodle Atto editor to insert citations. Both plug-ins have to be installed by a Moodle administrator.

Europeana Colour Explorer (2016)

The Colour Explorer is a demonstrator to showcase the new media metadata filters and colour search available from Europeana

The Europeana Colour Explorer is a simple but playful demonstrator built to showcase the new media metadata methods introduced to the Europeana API in late 2015. Whilst the principal goal is to show the colour search, it also uses new functionality that allows filtering not just by license, but also to just items which have thumbnail images and those which are available at a certain resolution for direct download.

The entire app is client-side and each page is built from a single API call.

It can combine colour searches and has options to share via Facebook and Twitter - do share your favourites!

Europeana OAI-PMH Harvester (2016)

PHP based harvester to download all records via the Europeana OAI-PMH Service

This PHP script downloads all Europeana records via OAI-PMH protocol. The result are a number of files (named as europeana-oai-pmh-import-dddddddd.json), each contain 1000 records, one record per line in JSON format. Be aware: a full harvest takes more than a week and resulted 250+ GB content.

For more about the service, see the Europeana OAI-PMH documentation.

OAI-PMH harvester code on Github

Europeana Blacklight (2016)

Ruby gem providing an adapter to use the Europeana REST API as a data source for Blacklight.

Europeana REST API adapter for Blacklight. Used in Europeana Collections.

Ruby gem providing an adapter to use the Europeana REST API as a data source for Blacklight.

The code is available on GitHub under a European Union Public Licence v. 1.1 license. There is also a Quick Start Guide.

Open Pics app (2015)

This open source app allows search for images in multiple online collections, such as Europeana, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, California Digital Library, Digital Public Library of America, LIFE Magazine photo archive, National Library of Australia (Trove) and Flickr Commons.

The app is designed for both iPad and iPhone and is available in 15+ languages.

Find the source code on Github

Museums.eu (2015)

http://Museums.EU describes itself as "The European Museums Network intended to present and promote museums and cultural heritage across Europe".

The site is a comprehensive resource for exploring Europe's cultural heritage collections. This ever growing site contains information about thousands of museums, plus events, activities, and collections. They also pull together and write their own extensive articles ranging from museums news to daily art features.

For museums that have content in Europeana, live API calls pull in top content and also allow users to search within it.

Photomediations (2015)

Photomediations: An Open Book redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience.

Photomediations: An Open Book redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience. It features over 200 images drawn from Europeana and other open repositories, it tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media.

The book also contains three open chapters, the content of which can develop and grow over time: a collection of essays about the idea of photomediations; a social space; and an exhibition (coming in 2015-2016). Photomediations: An Open Book is an experiment in open and hybrid publishing – as well as a celebration of the book as a living object. The book is part of Europeana Space, and is made available under the CC BY licence 4.0, though individual licences apply to all included images, as indicated.

Sound Connections (2015)

Explore sounds from across Europe and help enrich them with contextual information and audio-visual media.

Sound Connections allows users to explore sound collections from across Europe and enrich them with comments, links, photos, videos and audio clips. Sound Connections provides four thematic pages: aviation, city soundscapes (London and Amsterdam) and birdlife. All themes can be explored by location and date and are accessible from the Sound Connections landing page on http://historypin.org

The Europeana API was used to integrate sound assets from the two content providing Pilot partners; the British Library (BL) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV). Sound Connections is hosted on the community engagement platform Historypin, which is run by Shift Design (formerly We Are What We Do). The code for the Europeana API ingest on Historypin is available on GitHub: github.com/Historypin/europeana-api-ingest

VanGoYourself (2015)

Find and release your inner Van Gogh

VanGoYourself is a different and surprisingly deep way for visitors to engage with heritage, based on emotion, playfulness and curiosity. Recreate a painting or historic photo with your friends, then upload and share your photograph, twinned with the original, for others to enjoy.

The service, built on the WordPress platform, is free and very simple to use by everyone with a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer. Simply choose an artwork to recreate. Take and upload a picture, and the service will twin it with the original. You can then share your new Van Gogh through your preferred digital channels.

Tired of just looking at paintings?

The service can also be used by tourist offices, museums, cities, tour guides, etc. to promote specific destinations, sites and events.

http://VanGoYourself.com was successfully launched during the Museums at Night / International Museums Day on May 15, 2014, and introduced to the world through three VanGoYourself (VGY) events organised with the help of Culture24 and Plurio.net in the UK and in Luxembourg.

At the time of launch, users could recreate more than 50 paintings, from 12 collections. Most of the items are from Europeana. The media response was overwhelming (BBC, Telegraph, Newsweek, artsnet, etc.) with around 40 articles on VGY. It also went viral on social media with a Twitter reach of around five million potential users during the launch weekend, according to tweetbinder stats.

Building the case for sharing masterpieces

The Tourism Pilot encountered challenges related to content and content sourcing. Often it is only a few masterpieces that build the fame of a huge collection. Unfortunately, this “last one percent” is often not made available by providers via Europeana. Or the items have rights statements that do not allow reuse.

This pilot could change all that. Its tremendous success has helped to build a case for opening up a collection for reuse by creative industries and the tourism sector.

The Challenge Event for the Tourism and Social Networks themes took place in September 2014 in Barcelona. In January 2015 the “Embed VanGoYourself On Your Site” widget was launched. It allows users to embed either a single re-creation or choose a feed of VanGo’d images. A VanGoYourself shop has been set up on the CafePress platform where VGY merchandising articles are available. The team is also negotiating promising partnerships with museums and city marketing initiatives all over the world.

Inventing Europe (2015)

Bringing historians and museums closer together

The Inventing Europe online platform is a pioneering collaboration between historians and cultural heritage institutions across Europe.

The platform explores the history of technology in Europe using curated exhibitions and tours. These virtual journeys are based on the objects and images of the partner heritage institutions and are enriched with relevant materials from Europeana collections through the Europeana API.

The exhibitions group together tours around a specific technology theme, such as Daily Lives, Media & Communications, Knowledge Societies, Infrastructure, Globalisation & Governance. Every tour comprises a collection of four to six stories, each outlining an aspect of the history of technology in Europe.

Besides the exhibitions, curators from the partner institutions and other experts are invited to expand the contextual stories and contribute their perspectives in the form of new guest-curated tours.

Serendip-o-matic (2015)

Serendip-o-matic connects your sources to digital materials located in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. By first examining your research interests our serendipity engine helps you discover photographs, documents, maps and other primary sources.

As their page states: "Serendip-o-matic connects your sources to digital materials located in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. By first examining your research interests, and then identifying related content in locations such as the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, and Flickr Commons, our serendipity engine helps you discover photographs, documents, maps and other primary sources.

Whether you begin with text from an article, a Wikipedia page, or a full Zotero collection, Serendip-o-matic's special algorithm extracts key terms and returns a surprising reflection of your interests. Because the tool is designed mostly for inspiration, search results aren't meant to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive, pointing you to materials you might not have discovered. At the very least, the magical input-output process helps you step back and look at your work from a new perspective. Give it a whirl. Your sources may surprise you."

Serendip-o-matic is the product of One Week | One Tool and was built by a team of 12 dynamic scholars, librarians, and students.

CultureCam (2015)

The Culture Cam tool offers a non-text based visual search interface to European cultural heritage.

With Culture Cam people can browse a sub collection of Europeana’s content in an easy and intuitive way through a colour, a shape or a pattern by using the camera from a computer or mobile phone. Culture Cam enables and engages creative people and industries with European digital cultural heritage to find inspiration and source materials for new designs and art artefacts. All pictures in Culture Cam are under public domain, meaning that all the copyrights are waived or expired.

The code of Culture Cam (back-end) is open source and available via github.com/europeana/Europeana-Creative

Culture Cam is developed by the Danish Design Company Spild ad Tid in collaboration with Aalto University ARTS and The Austrian Institute of Technology.

Memory Match - Natural History edition (2015)

Memory Match – Natural History Edition, is an educational game combining the classic memory game of finding pairs with a quiz game testing player’s knowledge of natural history.

It is one of the pilot applications developed in the Europeana Creative project - a European project enabling and promoting greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by creative industries. The goal of this project was creating an educational game that will be reusing content from Europeana. The application was developed by Semantika in collaboration with the National Museum in Prague. The game is primarily aimed at school children and their teachers and parents.

The pilot app only uses preselected content. Content with high quality images was supplied by the Natural History Museum in Prague and was selected from several preselected topics such as Fossils, Minerals and Butterflies. MyEuropeana is used to preselect content, which is already in Europeana.

The complete application code is available on GitHub: github.com/semantikaeu/memorymatch/ enabling programmers to reuse and expand upon it.

Banner source: (en) She's a sack company - https://www.europeana.eu/item/318/marc_nli_004020935. Hadani, Dan. National Library of Israel. CC BY - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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