Content from small and medium local institutions such as museums, archives and libraries is still underrepresented in the digital European arena. Cloud-based technology could offer an affordable and user-friendly solution for making their content available on-line.

LoCloud aims to develop cloud-based technology and services to help small and medium local institutions to aggregate their digital resources and make them accessible on-line, via Europeana.eu, the European Library, Museum and Archive.

The project will explore the potential of a cloud-based technology infrastructure for aggregating local content. It will also develop a number of micro-services offering geo-location and metadata enrichment, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, a historical place name gazetteer and a Wikimedia application to handling relevant ‘crowd-sourced’ content.

As a result of the LoCloud’s activities, access to over 4 million items of digital content will be made available through Europeana.

LoCloud relies on a large group of technical partners, content providers, aggregating services and partners with specific expertise which make together a very strong consortium. Gunnar Urtegård, from National Archives of Norway, project coordinator, underlined during the meetings close: “If we can keep it simple for content providers, keep simple for users and remove all the complexity in-between, then this project has the potential to be a great success.”

Europeana.eu provides access to the digitized content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. It currently includes over 26 million books, photographs, paintings, films, sound recordings and archival resources from more than 2,200 institutions in every European member state.  More information can be found at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/.

LoCloud is one of a suite of projects, funded by the European Commission, to develop Europeana and enhance its contents. It will explore the potential of cloud computing technologies for Europeana, with a focus on small and medium sized institutions. It aims to support them in making their content and metadata available to Europeana.eu. To this purpose a set of services and tools will be developed to help to reduce technical, semantic and skills barriers and to enhance Europeana. See an older entry in this blog that describes Paths, a previous project related with this subject.

LoCloud aims to build on the achievements of two earlier Best Practice Network projects: CARARE, in establishing a repository-based aggregator for Archaeological and Architectural heritage; and Europeana Local, in its work with local institutions and their regional and national aggregators, which has resulted in the contribution to date of well over 5 million items to Europeana.

The LoCloud web site will go live at the end of April at: www.locloud.eu.

LoCloud  is co-funded by the European Commission’s ICT Policy Support Programme.

Contact:  Aitor Soroa (a.soroa (at) ehu.es)