Judaica Europeana
Judaica Europeana is a project funded by the European Commission eContentplus programme with the goal of providing access to Jewish culture through the Europeana portal.
To this end, Judaica collaborates with cultural institutions to identify, digitizeand aggregate contents that document the Jewish contribution to European culture, to further their integration in the Europeana repository and encourage schools and academic institutions to exploit it.
To this end, Judaica collaborates with cultural institutions to identify, digitizeand aggregate contents that document the Jewish contribution to European culture, to further their integration in the Europeana repository and encourage schools and academic institutions to exploit it.
The project will provide online access to a great many objects and other contents of Jewish interest currently scattered among a great number of collections: documents, books, manuscripts, serials, sound recordings, images, photographs, videos, postcards and broadsides. Europeana multilingual search engine shall act as a one-stop-shop to allow users to find, view and compare the treasures of Jewish cultural heritage. The contents produced by Judaica Europeana will be aimed at a varied audience, including university professors and students, schools, professionals in the cultural heritage sector, family history students, and the public at large: anyone with a professional or personal interest in the history of Jewish culture and European cities.
Judaica Europeana:
- aggregates Jewish contents from the databases of its partners and other collections;
- coordinates standards among institutions in order to ensure interoperability and best practices;
- proposes knowledge management tools that allow users to adopt dictionaries and thesauruses for the indexing, recovery and reuse of relevant content related to their areas of interest.
ICCU coordinates the Italian contribution. The Palatina Library in Parma and the Venice State Archives are currently involved in digitization efforts and production of metadata.
Information about Judaica Europeana is available at the project website: http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/.
Its results are summarized in the project newsletter: http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/Newsletter.html
Furthermore, as part of the Judaica Europeana project dissemination efforts, ICCU, together with CulturaItalia, launched the Star of David and Tricolour Flag project, a web 2.0 space open to all users who want to use text, videos, photosand audio materials to illustrate the Jewish contribution to Italy’s social, cultural and political life, from Italy’s unification – whose 150th anniversary took place in 2011 – up to the present: customs and traditions changing over time, participation in the countrypolitical life, integration and post-unification migration , but also religion - before and after the Concordat – and culture, observed and described through the cultural products – from books to performance art – which best represent the relationship between Judaism and Italian unification.
For more information: ic-cu@beniculturali.it