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Enhancing the discovery of Europe’s sound archives

Title (author1): 
Mr
First names (author1): 
Richard
Surname (author 1): 
Ranft
Institution: 
The British Library
Country: 
UNITED KINGDOM
Presentation type: 
spoken paper
Date: 
1 Oct Thursday
Start time: 
1 230
Venue: 
Grand Auditorium
Abstract: 

Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/) provides online discovery in 32 languages to over 35 million items of Europe’s sound heritage: texts, images, videos and sounds and museum objects. Its value lies in improving access to many online collections that were previously dispersed and difficult to find: users can search and browse in their language of choice across previously hidden collections housed in 2,500 different institutions. The Europeana Sounds project (2014-2017) is taking this a step further for the medium of audio in several ways (www.europeanasounds.eu) : creating themed channels for sound on the Europeana portal, an improved data model for audio metadata, links across media types (music scores linked to musical performances), and new web features for user interaction. It will increase to over one million the number of sound recordings accessible via Europeana by 2017, and link to many thousands of related objects, whether photos of musical instruments, videos of musicians and famous speakers, music scores and spoken word transcripts. The project partners include several institutions that are IASA members, and will work with IASA to build a sustainable network for improving access to other sound archives in Europe. A beta version of the new sounds channel prototype will be demonstrated.