Electronic Libraries: European digital library will be enriched with contemporary art works

The European Commission and the DCA consortium, comprising 25 partners from 10 EU  member states and the 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland, have officially launched the project Digitizing Contemporary Art (DCA) initiating a significant increase in the presence of  contemporary art in Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage.

Over 30 months 21 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 27,000  contemporary artworks and 2,000 contextual documents, making them available through the Europeana portal. With the co-funding of the European Commission under the CIP-ICT PSP programme and the commitment of the 25 partners, the DCA project aims to create high-quality  digital reproductions and assure the long-term preservation of and online access to such  reproductions and their data.  

By July 2013 the metadata on the digitized objects will be mapped, enriched, contextualised, and aggregated for ingestion into Europeana. The DCA project will also deliver digital thumbnail images of objects and links to high-quality reproductions to Europeana. The partner institution can then make this digital content available through their own websites and other channels as well. This will facilitate the public online access to (parts of) the contemporary art collections of partner institutions and foster augmented user experience. At the same time the digital reproductions and metadata will also contribute to the preservation of the artworks and contextual documents.