“Europe’s digital cultural heritage has been embedded in education and fostered innovation”, the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology was pleased to announce in a retrospective report published on Thursday 9 January.
This document, which takes stock of the period 2023-2024, the second year of existence of the common European data space for cultural heritage, highlights its role as an accelerator in the digital transformation and re-use of data in this sector, particularly in the education, university and research communities.
Indeed, while “the future citizens of Europe, individuals, students and educators in primary and secondary institutions across Europe, can benefit from the cultural heritage materials offered in the data space”, the Europeana Foundation – the governing body of the Europeana service, the European digital platform launched in November 2008 by the European Commission – in collaboration with the network for innovation in education, European Schoolnet, and the European Association of History Educators, EuroClio, has also been working over the past year to improve digital skills and abilities.
The aim was also to increase the use of educational resources derived from data shared via the Europeana website.
A total of 2,420 people have been trained via online courses and national training courses. The activities organised by the EF, EUN and Euroclio have also led to the creation of 1,304 resources based on data shared on the Europeana.eu website, which have been or will be published on the Teaching with Europeana blog and the Historiana.eu website, visited more than 109,000 times during 2023-2024.
This progress is reflected in an excellent satisfaction rate of 90% for the question “I would recommend Europeana resources for education to my colleagues”, measured by the EUN as part of the evaluation of the MOOC training course.
These successes are not limited to the educational sphere. In fact, supporting the re-use of heritage data is one of a range of achievements highlighted in the report, including performance improvements to the data space infrastructure and Europeana.eu for a better browsing experience.
Finally, this year has seen further development of data aggregation systems, particularly 3D, in line with the objectives of the European Commission’s 2021 recommendation (https://aeur.eu/f/f0a ).
The report: https://aeur.eu/f/f03 (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)