Tecnalia participates in the project to expand and improve “Europeana”, the great European Digital Library

• Tecnalia, through its Information and Interaction Systems Unit, participates along with 23 other partners from 10 different countries at ASSETS, a project co-financed by the European Commission, which aims to improve the use of Europeana, the platform for a European Digital Library

Europeana is a European digital library, open access, which opened on November 20, 2008, which brings together digitized contributions from recognized cultural institutions of the 27 EU member countries. Its collection includes books, films, paintings, newspapers, sound files, maps, manuscripts and other files.

Within the project assets, the Information and Interaction Systems Unit of Tecnalia participates in the design and development of graphical user interface, specially designed to search through large multimedia files. The aim is to improve the usability of the Europeana through advanced digital applications that provide intelligent access to a wide range of media within a comprehensive, interactive retrieval, through feedback mechanisms and log analysis, and customization according to user preferences.

The initial project began in 2005 the European Commission Information Society and Media, and its current development, with a budget of 120 million euros, is provided by Community eContentPlus program and is supervised and coordinated by the Foundation European Digital Library, located in Amsterdam (Netherlands). The prototype of the platform is available in many European languages.

On the first day of opening there were a number of visits than the servers couldn’t respond, causing a collapse of the service that was not restored until 18 December 2008.

Today, the European Digital Library stores 7 million digital objects, including books, films, paintings, newspapers, sound files, maps, manuscripts and other files.

During his two-year, ASSETS deploy all services applicable to digital libraries and will involve specific groups of users in the analysis, design, scale implementation, testing and evaluation. ASSETS project plans to create a group of value-added services search, navigation and access to long term that directly improve the accessibility of content and usability of Europeana operational services and validated a large-scale deployment of such services in the context of actual use of the platform.