We are delighted and proud to announce that Art Stories has won the Europeana Challenge 2016, an European project about open date and cultural innovation.
Let’s transform the world with culture!
This is the motto of Europeana, the Dutch foundation established by the European Union in 2011 to gather and organise the immense artistic and cultural heritage in Europe into a database that can be shared and accessed by all.
Anyone can use the site to look for materials for their own research, inspiration for their own work and studies, or just for fun. It’s a virtual library open to everyone.
Thousands of museums, galleries and archives are digitising their collections, creating virtual copies of the materials in their care. Once these collections are put online and made public, Europeana works towards making them easier to access and use. Those who contribute to the database include prestigious institutions such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louvre and British Library as well as regional archives and small local museums around Europe. The collection includes millions of objects, from high-res images of paintings to documents, texts, videos, books and films, allowing us to explore our common heritage from prehistory to the present day.
At the heart of the project is the idea that open data related to the artistic and cultural fields can promote change, stimulate new ideas and encourage innovation and progress.
With precisely this in mind, in February 2016 Europeana launched the first in a series of challenges to promote ideas, and projects that would apply the data available on the portal to innovative uses. 7 projects were selected from the 50 submitted, and after a long and in-depth interview about our objectives, team, ideas and business model, 3 were selected, among them Art Stories!
We proposed an educational app to introduce pre-school and school-age children of to art historical themes using content selected from the Europeana Art and History Collection. We are already working hard on the project, which will see light of day in July 2016. For the past few days, our noses have been immersed in the datebase, leafing through fabulous images and doing our research by searching both by artist and source but also by colour… For now we’re saying no more. But there’s good news for our Android friends: this time the app will also be available on Google Play!
What is this cultural innovation spoken of so often but rarely defined with precision?
