Thursday, April 7, 2011

Europeana: 15 Million Images, Videos, Audio Files, and Texts

If you have not yet visited Europeana, here's your chance to "study abroad." Europeana is a an impressive digital library of over 15 million items from 1500 museums, archives, libraries, and other organizations representing the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe. As described on their about us page, these items include:
  • Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
  • Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
  • Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
  • Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

After conducting a basic or advanced search, search results are presented as a mix of all of these object types, but you can choose from  Images, Videos, or Sounds tabs to examine those types in particular. You can also refine your search by provider, country, language, type, dates, or rights.

If you register for an account you can save your searches, save particular items, or save tags.