DEMYSTIFYING PUBLISHING TO EUROPEANA: A PRACTICAL WORKFLOW FOR CONTENT PROVIDERS

Every organisation needs to introduce itself in a target audience, promote its products and establish its presence amongst other competitive parties. This also applies to cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, archives, private or public stakeholders. Usually their approach involves the use of IT and especially the Web. Through these technologies they document, digitise, study, disseminate and exhibit their cultural wealth. Of common practice is the usage of ontologies and metadata schemas to provide access to those assets. The European Commission adopted the vision of a single access point to the European Cultural Heritage, which would be open to the public. In order to achieve this vision the European Digital Library was founded and the Europeana project was established. Europeana became an organisation that provides technological expertise and legal support to those stakeholders who want to share their assets. In this paper we describe the network structure of Europeana, the metadata technology and finally the workflow that someone needs to comprehend and apply in order to become partner of Europeana as a content provider.