Europeana

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is an accredited National Aggregator for Europeana, and an active member of the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum. As such, we support the aggregation of Irish digital cultural heritage content to the Europeana platform, which provides a centralised search and discovery portal for content from European Cultural Heritage Institutes, and makes Irish content accessible to a wider European audience. DRI staff are involved in several Europeana Network Association communities and participated in the 3D Content to Europeana Task Force (January 2019 – February 2020).

DRI participated in the Europeana Generic Services projects  Europeana Common Culture (January 2019 – December 2020) and EnrichEuropeana+ (April 2020 – March 2023). These projects, co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union, allowed us to develop our Europeana aggregation functionality and to enhance it with support for 3D content and Transcribathon integration.

We also collaborated with EPIC the Irish Emigration Museum, European Expo2020, The Hunt Musuem, University of Limerick Conference & Sports Campus, Fethard Horse Country Experience (FHCE) and Black and Irish, in partnership with Europeana to collect ephemera and stories of sport in Ireland as part of the Europeana Sport – Ireland’s Stories project.

In 2019, we were awarded a Europeana Research Grant to run a series of educational events on the topic of FAIR and Open Data for the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.

More recently, we have been working with The Discovery Programme, with the support of the Office of Public Works and the National Monuments Service to aggregate a 3D digitised heritage asset to the European data space for cultural heritage, deployed by the Europeana Initiative, as part of ‘Twin it! 3D for Europe’s Culture‘. The goal of the campaign is to collect and showcase emblematic and high-quality samples of Europe’s cultural assets in 3D, while supporting Member States in their 3D digitisation and preservation efforts.

We provide guidance and support to Irish Cultural Heritage Institutes and holders of cultural heritage data to help prepare data for aggregation to Europeana. We also host Europeana-related events and training activities. Recordings of some past events are available below:

• Using FAIR Data from the GLAM sector (in collaboration with Europeana Research and RDA Ireland)
• Publishing GLAM data as FAIR data (in collaboration with Europeana Research and RDA Ireland)
• DRI and the Europeana Common Culture Project: Sharing Irish Digital Data in a European Context