This grew out into the launch of Europeana, a platform for digital cultural heritage in 2008 which was named Digital Service Infrastructure by the EU in 2015. This digital service infrastructure allows us to develop the platform to serve end users, data partners and re-user audiences.

Europeana is a not-for-profit foundation based in The Hague at the National Library and governed by a governing board of experts and representatives from the cultural and scientific heritage organisations across Europe. Not only are we an office of over 50 people, members of staff in The Hague, we are supported by the Europeana Network Association,

made up of an active community of over 1700 individuals, digital heritage specialists and technical experts who generously give their time and expertise and are involved in several expert groups, for example Europeana Tech, a dedicated community working in our research and development sector, but also an EU member countries expert group, providing a forum for collaboration between members, countries and the European Commission

in the areas of digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation, as well as obviously dedicated communities of interest for research, education and creative reuse. So together we work a big huge ecosystem with a shared mission to expand and improve access to Europe's digital cultural heritage.

All across Europe, museums, galleries, libraries and archives are digitising their collections so that anyone can explore and learn from them. Once these collections are made available, we work to make sure people can

find them, use them either for fun, for education, but also for lifelong learning. So working as a platform, we bring together these organisations to have great content with the users and the sectors that want to do stuff with these beautiful collections. So this is our homepage Europeana Collections, Europe's digital library. From books, photos, paintings, television broadcasts, 3D objects, we offer online access to cultural heritage material from all across Europe.

Publishing more than 50 million digital objects from over 3500 cultural institutions across Europe. And we really believe that access to a shared heritage, whether it's music, books, films, art or social history, can really make people's lives richer.

And we aim to make this valuable content more accessible and more beneficial to more and more people. So in our 2015-2020 updated strategy, we've defined three high-level priorities how we will work to achieving these goals by focusing on five core markets.

Firstly, the cultural heritage institutions for which we want to make it easier and more rewarding to share their high-quality collections with us, for the European citizen to engage people on the website and let them participate in our campaigns, and for re-users in research, education and creative industries. And how we will do that is through scaling with partners to reach these audiences.

So our first priority is to make it easier for heritage institutions to share their content that is of high quality and openly licensed. And we aim to reward to the institutions for their work on improving the quality of the data by giving greater visibility for their collections and access to their collections. For example, through our dramatic collection, which I will touch upon later.

The platform truly relies on the cooperation that comes from all these galleries and libraries and museums and archives across Europe. And these institutions make up for a network of data partners. However, it's not scalable to work with 3700 institutions directly. And in practice, we work with them through a number of national, regional, thematic and domain aggregators,

communicating through a dedicated aggregator forum. Aggregates are incredibly important for Europeana because they're the background with the organizations whose content they bring together, so they're to close understanding. And this model enables Europeana to collect huge quantities of data from thousands of providers through a handful of channels.

Germany is important to note, of course, the second largest provider of material into Europeana, bringing in over 5 million digital objects. We work in close collaboration with the Deutsche Digitabebirte, our dedicated aggregator, and the one we have worked in great partnership with.

Working with aggregators in Europeana is key to ensure that data is interoperable and that it's licensed properly, so that the user knows what they can and cannot do with the data. And as a network, we've developed standards for sharing cultural heritage online, a content strategy, licensing and advocacy frameworks, as well as a practical guide.

So how to provide your data to Europeana, what are the minimal technical criteria, how should digital objects be labeled? Our second priority is to engage people and increase participation, and at the heart of this, of course, is our online platform Europeana.eu,

which we always look to further develop into the ultimate library, a place where you can find everything you ever wanted to know about European culture. And as stated before, you can access from here over 50 million digital objects from 3500 institutions in 27 languages.

Through Europeana collections, we aim to inspire you to discover content, and we promote the use of open content so you can do stuff with it, so we license it. Licensing is a big thing for us, making sure that you exactly know what you can do with the data. We stimulate use and reuse, and we want to encourage partner engagement on the platform and elsewhere.

However, we understand it might be a little bit overwhelming to dive into this corpus of over 50 million digital objects. It's everything, but it's also who is it for and what is it exactly? So therefore, we've developed thematic collections, so dividing up the collection by theme, like, for example, art, music, 1914-1918, sport, fashion, migration, and much more.

These thematic collections take the people deep into Europeana by presenting some of the best material in an easy-to-explore showcase, unique and trustworthy resources from the whole range of cultural heritage institutions. And because they're often available for reuse, people can share this material and create new things with them.

And by segmenting these collections more thematically, we make it easier for people to find what they're interested in and giving them a better experience, and it's also what we're getting back from the users. So we also have a suite of editorial features such as blogs, galleries, and a beautiful exhibitions platform that we're able to create and share engaging narratives and showcase collections in a visually appealing format.

And we develop these exhibitions, often in partnership, but also we decide to develop some exhibitions ourselves. We promote these extensively through social media and Facebook, Twitter, but also through the newsletter,

and also in partnership, of course. We're very happy to be the proud partner of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, and this is how we want to engage a core audience with Europeana through participatory campaigns. So this year we're running two major campaigns, one on Europeana migration and a centenary tour for 1914-1918,

including collection days and transcribe-a-thons, really allowing both to show how the past has shaped the present. Scaling with partners, here we come down to in our strategy we focus on developing the reuse of cultural heritage material

in education, academic research, and the creative industries. We're working with the collections to make them available for educators, teacher networks, ministries of education, research networks, but also innovators. We do this by offering practical resources to start building with cultural collections, including openly licensed thematic datasets and free APIs.

We realize that educational curricula differ and national priorities differ. At the core of educational systems, we all want to make the most interesting and inspiring content available for students and lifelong learners. Our collections provide multiple perspectives on historical, political, economical, cultural, and human developments across Europe and beyond.

We've designed a dedicated space on the Europeana professional network page through which we aim to bring together all of those. It's really an informal network that is open to the whole educational community,

including educational publishers, NGOs, other professional and membership organizations, and representatives from the ministries of education. An example of our collaboration at ministerial level is our pilot with the French Ministry of Education, launched in August 2017. We work with the ministry to design a Europeana dedicated page on Edutech, the French national educational portal.

The portal is being used by over 126,000 primary and secondary teachers in France, and features links to a selection of fully translated galleries, exhibitions, curated searches that the ministry has selected as being particularly relevant for French educators. These include, for example, the translating Leaving Europe, a New Life in America, that was an exhibition that we once curated,

relevant in the context of migration into and across Europe, and a search for cultural heritage content relating to the life and role of women in World War I. This collaboration also includes working with selected French teachers to develop new educational learning resources with Europeana content.

Essential in the partnership is obviously that both the resources and the learning activities are on topic relevant to the French curriculum. Something that I would like to highlight is also the transcribe-a-thon. So we launched this pilot with the French Ministry of Education during the annual digital education summer university for educators in France,

where we also introduced French teachers to our transcribe-a-thon tool. Building on Europeana 1914-18, a unique digital archive of the First World War, bringing together personal stories, letters and diaries that gives a really good insight into lived experiences across Europe during the war.

This is the history that you can find in textbooks. And we really wanted to introduce this transcription tool to show this in an educational setting, and show to teachers how you can make history come to life in your classroom. By letting the students play with these documents of the past.

So we've developed tutorials, also in German and also in French, that are available to all for anyone to reuse. And the transcribing can really have an impact on people. I want to show you a short interview with two students who participated in the transcribe-a-thon event at the Berlin State Library last year.

Two girls, one from Germany, one from Romania, who really moved me. If somebody can help me. The whole project shows how terrible war is.

And I once heard a quote, if we have World War III, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. And I don't think anyone wants that. So if I've learned anything, then we should learn from the past and shouldn't forget about it or push it away. I feel that we are part of something big that helps preserve the history.

I definitely want to continue because I want to preserve the past and I want to know what happened and how people felt. It's more important to know the people's part of the story. And it's more important to hear their truth, not the leaders' truth or what the media says.

That's why I will definitely continue transcribing and especially geo-tagging and like adding data. It was really quite emotional to see what an impact it had on students. They did it because they wanted to spend their time on it.

It's not because they had to. And this is what she told us afterwards. She was exploring a letter and afterwards she was thinking, where's the next letter? The next letter was not there. She really wanted to know what happened. And I was so impressed. I'm impressed the German girl was 16 when we recorded this. I'm incredibly impressed how articulate she is and how she moved everyone around us.

So that's really how I think this can make a difference in how you use this, for example, in your history classes or how you can really learn from the past. Another element of how we want to bring forward Europeana's resources to teachers

is the development of a MOOC that we've developed together with the Association of 31 Ministries of Education in Europe, European SchoolNet. This MOOC is running right now and it's really to improve teachers' understanding of cultural heritage in order to efficiently integrate digital culture into their lessons and practices.

The MOOC introduces participants to the Europeana platform where to find different resources, the text, the tools that they can easily integrate in their lessons. And it will help teachers build learning scenarios using digital cultural heritage in a framework of 21st century skills.

So the target audiences for this MOOC are primary and secondary school teachers and teachers, trainers from Europe and beyond, and other stakeholders, of course, like museum and cultural centres. It's running currently and we have 1,700 registrations, which we're incredibly pleased with, and the course will run around six weeks.

So also one element that European SchoolNet is also helping us with is setting up a European Teacher Developer Group, a group dedicated to create learning activities with digital cultural content. And the group currently consists of representatives from France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, and Finland, with one primary teacher and two secondary teachers per country.

And on behalf of my colleagues in the reuse team, I'm also happy to say that we would also welcome teachers from Germany to join this group and further develop learning scenarios. Lastly, I want to touch upon research and what we do in this area, so making cultural heritage work for research, because we realise there's huge potential for making this corpus available in the digital humanities,

and we've developed a dedicated space on our professional website called Europeana Research, which really aims to connect high quality data with the digital humanities directly via Europeana, but also through collaborations with the research infrastructures, supported by an advisory board made up of a wide range of digital humanities experts.

So how do we bring Europeana's data to these researchers? One can explore directly highlighted and curated data sets on the dedicated research base in Europeana, where we have selected data sets for specific interests to researchers, so featured collections and data sets, and obviously through the API and through collections directly.

One of our key programmes to bring the researchers to Europeana is also the Research Grants Programme for early career scholars, looking for early career scholars who have an individual research project making use of Europeana collections for research purposes,

employing state-of-the-art tools in the digital humanities to address a specific research question. This has proved to be very successful. We've run it now for the second year round, this year receiving almost 60 proposals from all across Europe, and it's so interesting also the insight that we get in how people want to make use of this big corpus

is really interesting for us. This year we focused the theme of the call on intercultural dialogue, also in line with the European Year of Cultural Heritage, and we thought this would be a great team, and we made a good choice, we received so many proposals. The researchers are currently working on their projects, so we don't have the outcomes of the project yet,

but at the end of late summer we expect to receive, late summer, am I saying this right? Yeah, late summer we expect our full report team. The work with our Clarion research infrastructure is something in how we want to bring Europeana's data

to where the researcher already is, not making sure that the researcher always has to come to Europeana, but truly embedding the data that sits in Europeana in infrastructures. So working with Clarion, the research infrastructure for language resources and technology is very beneficial. They make available these language resources to scholars, researchers, and students,

especially in humanities and social sciences, so it's a good match for Europeana. Lastly, I want to close with I think that Europeana is a great network, as well as a resource for teachers, researchers, and students across Europe, and we really believe that the sector can increase the change it brings in people's lives,

and we will continue to support this work by making cultural heritage accessible for all online, promoting interoperability, and supporting innovation. Thank you very much.