Europeana is a European Union initiative funded by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a programme run by the European Commission and the Member States. Europeana's mission is to support the cultural heritage sector in its digital transformation, providing useful knowledge and tools and fostering partnerships and networks. Europeana aims to appeal to a wide range of interests: “We share and promote Europe's digital cultural heritage to be used and enjoyed by everyone for learning, for work, or just for fun.”

Kulturpool is part of a network of European portals that make cultural heritage visible and accessible online. Europeana connects these digital collections by bringing together and visualising the data from the network of European data partners in its portal. In doing so, Europeana offers access to the diversity of the continent's collections not only to all Europeans, but to anyone all over the world. 

Europeana bridges historical eras and connects the institutions of the European Member States to one another, providing in-depth insights into history while promoting a responsible and sustainable approach to cultural heritage. The visualisation of historical objects in Europeana illuminates new facets of cultural heritage. The objects can be explored not only in the context of a collection belonging to a single institution, but also in the wider context of collections of across the European continent. Europeana supports the endeavour to preserve cultural heritage digitally and within a network for future generations.

Underneath Europeana’s user interface is a complex process ensuring that the digitised collections from the individual countries can be brought together and displayed. Europeana works together with national partners such as Kulturpool. These partners provide data, namely digitised cultural heritage, from the museums, libraries, and archives of their respective countries to Europeana, which then displays all the data together in a process called aggregation. The result is a centralised search portal containing European countries’ diverse digital heritage in its entirety. 

What do a handwritten historical text, scientifically documented plant and animal artefacts, and a painting all have in common? Europeana has the difficult task of linking digital and digitised cultural heritage from different areas in one portal and making these objects visible. Many of the objects are accompanied by additional information with very different descriptions. Europeana has developed the “EDM” metadata standard (for Europeana Data Model) as a common standard that all the participating institutions use. This makes it possible to search for content-related issues across different sources. From a content perspective, the EDM data standard is the lowest common denominator. But from a data model perspective, it's a pretty big deal!

Kulturpool faces similar challenges; the digitised objects also come from many different institutional domains at national level. If the time-consuming process of adapting the data to a common standard were not carried out at national level by a national platform such as Kulturpool, Europeana would be faced with an impossible task. After all, we are talking about thousands of institutions from all over Europe.