Europeana is a catalyst for change in the world of cultural heritage. Its mission is to create new ways for people to engage with their cultural history, whether it’s for work, learning or pleasure. Europeana's vision is to make cultural heritage openly accessible in a digital way, to promote the exchange of ideas and information. This helps us all to understand our cultural diversity better and contributes to a thriving knowledge economy.

Key actors are Europeana Foundation, on the one hand, and Europe's cultural institutions, on the other. Europeana Foundation runs the Europeana portal and coordinates the network of contributing cultural institutions, currently around 2,200. On this ecosystem of collaborating national cultural institutions, Europeana brings together private content holders (who are digitising their collections and make them available online), technology firms and research institutes.

In summary, the Europeana Foundation's objectives are:

•    to make Europe's cultural and scientific heritage available through a cross-domain portal (Europeana.eu)
•    to work with museums, archives, audiovisual archives and libraries to deliver the portal and make it sustainable
•    to bring items that have already been digitised into the portal
•    to encourage and support the digitisation of more of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage

Most of the Europeana projects are co-funded by the European Union’s CIP ICT-PSP Programme (Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme).

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Europeana API:

Introduction

The Europeana API allows you to build applications that use the wealth of cultural heritage objects stored in the Europeana repository. The API uses the standard technology of REST calls over HTTP. Responses are returned in the JSON format.

If you wish to get straight to the point of the API you can skip the rest of this section, register, and proceed directly to the description of the API methods: search, record, and suggestions.

Registration

To start using the API you should register at the registration page. Upon registration you will get your individual private authentication key. This key should be used when calling API methods as a special wskey authentication parameter.

Backward Compatibility

The current version of the Europeana API (API2) is fully backward compatible with the previous version (API1). However, we encourage developers to switch to the new naming of the fields that were used in API1. For more information on the mapping between the new and the old fields, please see API1-API2 Fields Mapping.

API Console

There is a method for developers to see how Europeana API works and test it for their needs without getting registered - the API console. This is an interactive tool that allows filling method parameters in an online form and see both the expected results and the exact format of the call that should be used by an application to get these results. The API console has been built by us for developers’ convenience. You are encouraged to use it and provide us feedback about its usability for the developer community.

Discussion

Join the Europeana API discussion group at Google Groups and get regular updates about the Europeana API, provide feedback and discuss it with other developer.

Terms of Use

Please see here our Terms of Use.