Improving the User Experience with Audiovisual Content: The Project “Europeana Media”

Abstract

Europeana is the EU flagship initiative for digital cultural heritage that gives free access to more than 50 million digital objects coming from more than 3,500 libraries, archives and museums across Europe. Of this huge amount of digital cultural heritage content, over a million are videos and more than seven hundred thousand are audio documents. Audio and video materials keep users engaged on a website longer than any other content type and this is the kind of content most web users look for, and user statistics confirm this also on Europeana.eu. Hence the aim of the project Europeana Media was to improve the user experience with audiovisual material on the Europeana portal and deliver functionalities to better access and incorporate AV content from Europeana.eu into the working environments of researchers, educators and citizens by developing an Enhanced Unified Playout Service. This unified player is based on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which provides a standardised method of describing and delivering images, video and audio over the web.