What’s up, Europeana? (part 2)

What’s up, Europeana? (part 2)

Recently Europeana has crossed the level of 10 million objects. Because of this we have decided to calculate again some simple statistics regarding the participation of Polish resources in Europeana. For today the share of resources published in Europeana by Polish institutions is about 3,4% which gives Poland 9th place in Europe. As you may remember, in similar statistics prepared by us on the 29 of March this year Poland was on the 6th place, with a share about 4,5%.

Also the position of Digital Libraries Federation have changed. Since the last statistics was calculated, the number of objects from Polish institutions provided to Europeana via the Federation increased by over 34 thousands (more than 10% increase). It was to small, to hold the 8th position in the content providers ranking. Presently the DLF occupies position number 10.

More detailed statistics are available here. Although such statistics and its comparisons should not be read directly – e.g. nowadays Poland digitizes and publishes on-line its cultural heritage slower than other European countries. We assume that the high level of technological advancement and coherence of digital libraries in Poland allowed us to contribute to Europeana in its early stage of activity. This is why Poland and DLF were quite high in the March statistics. Presently Europeana receives content from other institutions, from countries where the process of cultural heritage digitisation started earlier and was/is more intense. Such institutions are now technically ready to cooperate with Europeana and they were able to transmit large amount of data right from the beginning. That is why our position decreased.

Do we have a chance to catch up on this? Of course – the one thing is that more and more institutions in Poland starts to cooperate with Europeana. Some of these already publish on line significant amount of digital objects (e.g. National Digital Archive in collection http://www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl/ publishes around 150 000 objects). On the other hand the Polish Ministry of Culture has quite ambitious plans, described also in the documents that we have recently mentioned. So there is a hope 🙂