EuropeanaLocal was a Best Practice Network project, funded under the eContentplus programme of the European Commission, which ran from 1 June 2008 to 31 May 2011. It was designed to involve and help local and regional libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives:

• make the enormous amount of content that they hold available through Europeana (the European Digital Library)

• and deliver new services.

Europeana is developing a common multilingual access point which will make it possible to search Europe’s distributed digital cultural heritage online. It currently gives users direct access to nearly 20 million digital objects, including films, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers.

EuropeanaLocal was one of a suite of additional projects, funded by the European Commission to help further develop Europeana. EuropeanaLocal played an important role in ensuring that the enormous amount of digital content provided by Europe’s cultural institutions at local and regional level is represented in Europeana, alongside that held at national level. Such involvement not only brings together a rich diversity of content of all types, cultures and languages but also people, making it possible to establish integrated services with great richness and added value for communities and individual users.