The past twenty years has seen an enormous investment in the digitization of Europe’s Cultural Heritage, and much of it is accessible via the Europeana.eu platform. However, there is still very little understanding of how this content is used in research: among researchers, there still exists limited awareness of how to find and engage effectively with this content, specifically integrating it into the research life cycle. Barriers still exist, especially in the knowability of digital content; opening up this data for use and re-use; and creating better environments for drawing together multimedia content from a variety of sources for analysis and publication.
This presentation will draw on research undertaken for three collaborative European research projects, Europeana Research; Europeana Cloud; and the ESF Research Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), to explore the use of digital heritage in research. Specifically, the presentation will introduce the new programme of work developed through Europeana Research. This is an important mechanism for connecting digital heritage with the research community, creating a better understanding of how content and metadata is actually used, and its relationship with digital methods and tools, and developing targeted outreach and engagement activities and approaches. As such, it will explore the development of Europeana.eu as a potential “digital commons” for humanities research: a basis for future production, anticipating new ways of using and re-using digital heritage for research. It will also provide an important layer of evidence that will help shape the development of research infrastructures in the humanities.