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Transforming access to European sound collections

Title (author1): 
Mr
First names (author1): 
Richard
Surname (author 1): 
Ranft
Institution: 
The British Library
Country: 
UNITED KINGDOM
Other authors: 
Ms Zane Grosa
Presentation type: 
spoken paper
Date: 
27 Sept Tuesday
Start time: 
1330
Venue: 
LoC Madison Building: West Dining Rm.
Abstract: 

Europeana Sounds is a major 3-year project (www.europeanasounds.eu) to open up access to European audio heritage. It is achieving this by linking metadata records through Europeana’s massive multilingual web portal, which now provides discovery to 50 million online digital items: texts, images, video and audio from thousands of cultural institutions. Europeana Sounds’ core team involves 24 funded project partner institutions from 12 EU member states and is coordinated by the British Library. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring together 0.75 million audio and related digital objects, and enrich the content by machine-driven and crowdsourced tagging. It is also working closely with IASA to create a sustainable network of sound archives that will coordinate online access via Europeana. Plans are underway to include collections of European sound recordings held in institutions in the USA and other countries beyond the EU. Richard Ranft, Project Coordinator, will introduce the project. Zane Grosa will present the National Library of Latvia’s specific role in the project. She will look at the principles of content selection for aggregation, metadata mapping and dissemination of the sound collection and project results, including organising a local edit-a-thon to improve Wikipedia articles. Experience of curating the website of Europeana's Music collection will be shared, reflecting on the work involved and perceived gains of exposing collections to a wider audience.