Monday, March 22, 2010

Cultural web portal Europeana to begin offering online exhibitions



Europeana, an online service that brings together images, texts, sounds and videos from Europe’s museums, galleries, libraries, archives and collections will soon offer a groundbreaking multilingual online exhibition.

The exhibition, entitled, “A Roma Journey,” will feature a collection of full-text books, rare manuscripts, photographs, paintings, sound recordings and videos from the world of the Roma, or gypsies as they are also referred to, an ethnic group primarily located in Central and Eastern Europe. Users of the portal can use “My Europeana” to search, save and bookmark objects.

The exhibition has been organized by the European Library, one of Europeana’s first content providers, which also include the British Library in London and the Louvre Museum in Paris. The European Library has been working on channeling information from Europe’s national and research libraries into Europeana.

“A Roma Journey” also provides a preview of the type of virtual exhibitions that Europeana will offer in the future. Europeana will continue to work with the European Library to develop future virtual exhibitions for the Europeana portal.

The Europeana project began in 2007, after the European Commission decided to create a virtual European Library that would make Europe’s cultural and scientific resources accessible for all. Europeana.eu went live in November 2008, and the updated Europeana 1.0 will launch in 2010 with links to more than 10 million digital objects.

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