Europeana Cloud kicks-off! | LIBER

"On the 3rd of March project participants representing libraries, research infrastructures, developers, publishers and researchers gathered to discuss, workshop, brainstorm and network. Europeana Executive Director, Jill Cousins, opened the meeting by introducing the Europeana ecosystem and outlining the drivers and motivations for establishing a cloud based service for Europeana.   The project coordinator, Alastair Dunning, followed this by outlining the work of the project, its stakeholders and the challenges that need to be addressed over the course of the next 3 years.   The main aim of the meeting was to encourage interaction and discussion between the project partners, many of whom had not worked together before. Several workshops took place over the course of the 2 days, exploring barriers to  research, information access and collaboration, identifying solutions to these barriers, scoping the content that should be made available in Europeana Cloud, as well the technical requirements of such an infrastructure.  There is much work to be done over the coming years on order to ensure that Europeana Cloud realises its potential and becomes a robust infrastructure serving both the needs of the humanities and social science researcher and the content provider. The first step is to engage the researchers in order to scope potential tools and services as well as gaps in content that need to be filled. Legal and technical issues will also arise and will need to be addressed, in cooperation with related projects such as Europeana Creative, through engagement and dialogue.  To find out more about this project and which LIBER members are partners on the project go to:  http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud"