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Monday, August 3, 2009

Tools You Can Use: Europeana

"As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit."—Seneca

Search the Cultural Creations of Europe

Looking to write the next Da Vinci Code thriller, but don't have the funds to travel to Europe to research their cultural heritage? Use Europeana as your online muse to find ideas and inspiration. Europeana focuses on collections about Europe held in European libraries, archives, and museums.

Europeana Features

Links to 4 million digital items including

  • images: paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
  • texts: books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
  • sounds: music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
  • videos: films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Includes data from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague. Check out the world famous and hidden treasures from Europe's

  • museums and galleries
  • archives
  • libraries
  • audio-visual collections

Refine your search by language, country, date, provider: university, museum, etc., and type. Ask who, what, where or when:

  • Who: Names of actors, authors, architects, artists, choreographers, composers, conductors, dancers, film directors, musicians, or photographers.
  • What: Words from titles of books, poems, newspapers, paintings, photographs, films or television programs
  • Where: Names of towns, cities or countries within Europe or around the world.
  • When: Dates (e.g. 1945) such as the year you were born in or a famous date in history or a period (e.g. Roman or Medieval)

Groups search results by type of digital item: text, images, video and sound:

  • Text includes: books, letters, archival papers, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, facsimiles, manuscripts and music scores
  • Images includes: paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, pictures of museum objects, maps, graphic designs, plans and musical notation
  • Video includes: films, news broadcasts and television programmes
  • Sound includes: music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts

Displays your search results as a list or as a table

Browse through time via the timeline

Advantages of Free Registration

  • Registered Europeana users can:
  • Save this search: To keep up to date on a particular specific topic in Europeana.
  • Add a tag: To add your own tags to your favourite items in Europeana.
  • Save to My Europeana: To save your favourite items for viewing later.
  • Share with a friend: To share interesting items with your friends.

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