Europeana celebrates fifth birthday with 30 millionth object

In November, Europeana - Europe's digital library, archive and museum - celebrated its fifth birthday with the arrival of its 30 millionth cultural object. This milestone, according to Europeana, is two years ahead of the 2017 target.

The 30 millionth item to be available via Europeana is an animation that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2012, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. The film comes to Europeana through Ars Electronica, an Austrian organisation that brings together art, science and technology, Kulturpool, the Austrian national aggregator, and the Digitising Contemporary Art project. The animation is available under a Creative Commons licence, which means that it can be used and shared legally.

Jill Cousins, Europeana's executive director, commented, 'Reaching our fifth birthday and the 30 million mark in the same month is really something to celebrate. We are at a turning point and hope to start to reap the rewards of the hard work that has gone into Europeana – thousands of organisations across Europe work together on everything from developing new content and technology to making sure that digital collections can be made available in a useful and uniform way. The Europeana Open Culture app shows what is possible with openly accessible, correctly labelled data. We are looking for more such creative uses of our cultural heritage. Our task now is to move from being an online portal to a global platform where anyone can use the data for their own developments and projects.’