Project - Europeana Space -- Spaces of possibility for the creative re-use of digital cultural content

Overview

Europeana Space was a European initiative designed to unlock the creative and economic potential of Europe’s vast digital cultural heritage. The project aimed to increase and enhance the use of Europeana and other online cultural collections by the creative industries, addressing key barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to content, and the lack of sustainable business models for reuse.

By bringing together experts from the creative industries, technology enterprises, cultural heritage institutions, and higher education, Europeana Space created an open, collaborative environment for innovation. The project focused on enabling creators, producers, and cultural organisations to experiment with digital cultural content and develop new applications and services that demonstrate its commercial and societal value.

To support this, Europeana Space established three complementary environments—the Technical, Content, and Innovation Spaces—providing tools, guidelines, platforms for IPR management, and opportunities for hands-on experimentation. These spaces were reinforced through hackathons, workshops, incubation and mentoring activities, as well as themed pilots and demonstrators showcasing best practices across fields such as television, photography, dance, games, publishing, and cultural heritage.

Within this framework, IN2 played a key role as the main developer of DanceSpaces in the Europeana Dance Pilot. DanceSpaces introduced an innovative framework for exploring, sharing, and reusing dance-related cultural content and metadata from Europeana, serving both general audiences and dance professionals while demonstrating new, scalable models for the creative reuse of digital cultural heritage.

Alongside IN2, the following organisations formed the consortium:

• Coventry University, United Kingdom (Coordinator)
• Promoter Srl, Italy
• Packed Expertisecentrum Digitaal Erfgoed , Belgium
• IMINDS, Belgium
• CIANT, Czech Republic
• Eesti Vabariigi Kultuuriministeerium, Estonia
• Lehmann & Werder Museumsmedien, Germany
• Postscriptum, Greece
• Local Government Management Agency, Ireland
• Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy
• University Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, The Netherlands
• Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Italy
• Noterik BV, The Netherlands
• Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany
• National Technical University of Athens, Greece
• Proton Labs Ltd, Ireland
• Stichting Waag Society, The Netherlands
• The University of Exeter, United Kingdom
• Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Lithuania
• KU Leuven, Belgium
• Eureva SAS, France
• Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
• Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Germany
• Fondazione Sistema Toscana, Italy
• Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
• Culture Label Ltd, United Kingdom
• Onassis Cultural Centre, Greece