New Europeana features - translate, search other services and public domain display

2011-03-06

As part of the Danube programme of releases Europeana added three new features that users wanted. The new features will:

  • improve multilingual access
  • link Europeana results to search services like Wikipedia
  • allow users to limit their search to public domain content or see clearly that content is available with specific licences

Translation of descriptions

This will help users translate the metadata so that they get some sense of the description, whatever language it's in. When you're looking at a single item in Europeana you can click ‘Translate details' in the ‘Actions' menu on the lower left. You can then choose between translating using Google or Bing/Microsoft. Bing and Google will automatically detect the source language, you choose the language to translate the texts to and the object display is updated.  

External services search

This lets users find information about an item in Wikipedia, Internet Movie Database and other search services. Looking at individual objects you will now see small i icons next to certain metadata values, e.g. the name of a writer or composer in the Creator field. By clicking on those icons you can make quick lookups for more information about that person.

Try this example:  http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/09404/B755ADE214E722CEC8DFC893BC2D7EFDD328D0A6.html  

Refine search on ‘Rights'

When you perform searches and get the brief view results you will see on the left a new term, ‘Rights' under ‘Refine your search'. Opening that up will allow you to limit your results to objects that have specific rights statements or licences, e.g. only public domain content. Right now we have about 1 million objects with these rights/licences but the number will grow as part of our efforts to improve the quality and completeness of the Europeana metadata.

The Europeana licence framework, developed with Creative Commons, also allows for very clear marking of public domain content. This is a big step to help turn our Public Domain Charter into real services for our end-users and data providers. Each public domain icon under an object also links through to the Creative Commons public domain information and the Europeana public domain use guidelines.