Welcome to Museums.EU
We’re very excited to welcome you to Museums.EU! And welcome to the first in a series of blogposts, which will describe this incredible project, how it started and how it evolved over time.
Our vision is to create Museums.EU – the European Museums Network intended for digital presentation and promotion of museums and cultural heritage across Europe. Since the website already contains information about almost 10.000 museums and galleries across Europe, with hundreds of thousands of records like objects, collections, exhibitions and events, we believe that Museums.EU is well on its way to becoming the ultimate resource for everything related to museums in Europe.
The development of Museums.EU started many years ago – in 2009, when our team at Semantikapublished Museums.SI – the national website for museums and galleries in Slovenia. We love history, we love heritage and we’re very passionate about collections. So from the start, we envisioned a “Click once, publish everywhere” solution, where data entered into our standards based Collection Management System (Galis) could easily be published and be accessible to everyone through different technologies – from web to mobile. And we didn’t stop with collections. There is an incredible amount of interesting activities going on in museums and galleries and we wanted to offer them a platform where they could easily reach their target audience.
Over the next few years, great feedback from museum professionals and the increasing daily usage of our websites, mobile apps and other services, encouraged us to go even further. It inspired us toopen and expand the platform, to add other countries and languages, invest into new technologies and integrate with other projects working toward the same goal: making cultural heritage easily accessible to the general public.
We’re proud to be a partner in three amazing European projects: Europeana Inside, Europeana Creative and Europeana Food & Drink. It was through these projects, that we got closely involved with many incredible partners, including Europeana, a project and organization of huge importance, which has – in just 5 short years – thoroughly transformed the cultural landscape of Europe by making millions of objects available for reuse. We have already integrated several hundred collections from Europeana on Museums.EU and look forward to continue building Museums.EU on top of the Europeana platform.
Almost a thousand users joined us in the private beta period and provided us with invaluable feedback, support and encouragement, so the entire team at Semantika would like to say “thank you” to everyone that took part and to all museums that are already active members. We invite you to keep the conversation going and join us by providing any additional feedback you may have either by contacting us directly at editor@museums.eu or by filling-in this short 5 minute survey.
How can you participate?
If you’re a museum professional, you can easily sign-up your museum and start connecting with your visitors. Museums.EU offers an online CMS, which enables you to add basic information, exhibitions, events, activities and more. It even enables your museum to catalogue collections and objects! Access is FREE and you can sign-up by clicking JOIN at the top of the page.
And if you just enjoy using Museums.EU and think it’s a great project, there’s lots of ways you can contribute! We invite you to spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Know of anything that we’re missing? A museum? Or perhaps a great exhibition or an upcoming event? Simply click “Suggest an update” on any of the pages!
After years of development, announcing the launch of the public beta of Museums.EU is an important and exciting step for us, so I would once again like to say: welcome to Museums.EU!
Nina Zagoranski
CEO of Semantika
