Europeana Search API

2010-12-20

Europeana is currently working on piloting the Europeana search API.

Europeana is monitoring the interest from the project partners for this API. Should partners be interested and have the time to implement the Europeana API by February 2011, they can benefit from the attention from the official launch next year February.

As ATHENA project coordinator, ICCU invite all partners to investigate the possibility to benefit from this opportunity given by Europeana.

So should your organization take interest in implementing the Europeana API by February 2011 to take advantage of attention the launch will get, please send an email to david.haskiya@kb.nl with subject line "Interest in Europeana API".

Here a short overview of this Europeana's new service, provided by Lizzy Komen:

"Europeana API (Application Programming Interface) stands for a set of web services allowing search in and display of Europeana collections' metadata in provider's own applications/websites. It can be easily customized according to the provider's type and needs (provider's interface specifics/restrictions, end users' preferences, available technical resources for implementation and support, etc.) Partner institutions can choose between Europeana's two API-related products: (1) API and (2) search widget depending on their website concept and technical capacity".

Europeana API (available now for piloting and implementation by February 2011) allows for a higher level of service personalization. The partner institution can decide on the key elements of the Europeana results display (how much information to be shown, in what format, colors, etc.). They can also build up on the API usage and develop their own end user applications based on the API service (for instance, an iPhone application). The type and scope of the desired customizations will require more active partner engagement in the planning, execution and service maintenance.

Europeana Search Widget (only available in February 2011) can be considered a "stand alone" product. Europeana delivers a code snippet which can be immediately implemented on the provider's website; however, Europeana metadata will be shown in the" look & feel" of the Europeana portal.
Euroepana believes that API will have strong positive impact on provider's brand recognition, web performance and overall end user satisfaction. By implementing Europeana API solutions, partner institutions will:

  • Ensure better end users' experience by delivering richer, high-quality results to their user's queries.
  • Build loyalty end users will recognize the content provider's website as a trusted source of diverse and relevant information
  • Increase web traffic -the higher profile will naturally result in more visitors and visits.
Europeana API has been already tested in selected partner institutions. Here some of our successful pilots:
Their thesaurus provides authority data (persons, places, publishers) related to the early print era of publishing and the implementation means that whenever an author, publisher, place is shown in their search results related search results from Europeana is presented as well. E.g. for Melanchton, http://thesaurus.cerl.org/record/cnp01237223 or Grotius, http://thesaurus.cerl.org/cgi-bin/record.pl?rid=cnp01259444

Please note that Europeana API programme will be officially launched in February 2011. Europeana encourages early bird registrations in its API service from our project partners and will send additional documentation on request (API only; documentation for the search widget will be available in February 2011). However, Europeana would kindly ask you to keep this information and the code confidential and not to disseminate widely before the official launch".

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