OpenUp! – Opening up the European natural history heritage for Europeana

OpenUp! is an EC-funded project which aims to unite over one million natural history multimedia objects within Europeana, Europe’s digital library for cultural and natural history heritage.

OpenUp! is a 3-year-project involving 23 partners from 11 European countries which began in March 2011. The participating institutions will provide over one million multimedia objects from the natural history domain to Europeana.

Europeana (www.Europeana.eu) is a cross-domain portal to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage and is funded by the European Commission and the member states. Europeana provides links to over fifteen million multimedia digital items, including images, texts, sounds and video.

Using established technical infrastructures OpenUp! will create a single access point to distributed multimedia content in the natural history domain for Europeana. The project will facilitate a massive effort in data cleaning and validation and will ensure sustained and open item-level access to the multimedia items. Provision of multilingual metadata vocabularies and thesauri will enable enhanced cross-linking between Europeana content.

Kew will be a major content supplier within the OpenUp! network, with over 200,000 herbarium specimen images available for inclusion. Kew is contributing to the development of a data quality toolkit for all content providers through the development of a botanical names web service, which will enable validation of plant names against the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) as well as feedback on name status through a check against the Plant List (TPL). In addition, Kew is providing leadership in the documentation and development of a consistent IPR and copyright strategy in order to advise content provision by consortium members and future content providers.

Project duration: March 2011 – February 2014