The Jewish Museum of Greece is one of a number of partner organisations participating in Judaica Europeana, one of a series of initiatives supported by the European Commission to establish EUROPEANA, the European digital library. Europeana draws on rich content from libraries, archives and museums. A prototype is available at www.europeana.eu
JUDAICA Europeana will identify and digitize Jewish content for Europeana with a projected contribution of several million pages and thousands of other items. See www.judaica-europeana.eu.
Its main goals are:
- Documentation of Jewish expression in Europe: Encourage and support content holders in identifying Jewish content in their collections that reflect the activities, creativity and self-expression of Jews in European cities; to be integrated in Europeana under the theme of Cities.
- Digitisation and aggregation of this contentinto a coherent thematic collection to be incorporated into Europeana. Coordination of standards across institutions in order to synchronise the metadata with the interoperability requirements of Europeana.
- Deployment of knowledge management tools to enable communities of practice to adapt, and apply controlled vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies for the indexing, retrieval and re-use of the aggregated content pertinent to their own areas of interest.
- Support for the use of the digitised content in scholarship and academic research; university-based teaching; online teaching and learning; museum curatorship and virtual exhibitions; events and initiatives of cultural institutions in European cities; cultural tourism; visual arts, music and multimedia development; formal and informal education
JUDAICA Europeana’s main challenge is to facilitate access to a critical quantity of Jewish cultural heritage in Europe at the level of individual objects. Opening up access to these collections will take place in their proper context of creation and use, that of the wider European civilization provided by Europeana.
To find out more about the latest collections to go online visit Judaica Europeana’s newsletter.
In addition, two digital exhibitions, “Images of Greek Jews” and “jewish neighbourhoods of Greece”, have been uploaded and can be viewed on line.
The project is also funding a range of education programmes with schools and higher educational institutions, enabling more people to appreciate the rich material available on Greece’s Jewish heritage.
