CARARE brings together a network of heritage agencies and organisations, archaeological museums and
research institutions and specialist digital archives from all over Europe to establish an aggregation service for
Europeana. The project’s main objectives are to:
make digital content for Europe's unique archaeological monuments and historic sites available to
Europeana’s users;
establish tools and services to support and enable its network of partners to make their digital content
interoperable with Europeana, and to share best practices;
enable access to 3D and Virtual Reality content through Europeana; and
establish the business model for sustainability.
Summary of Activities
During its first year, the CARARE project has been preparing and enabling the network for harvesting and
aggregation of content for Europeana. Building good communications amongst the partner network began at
the project kick-off meeting in Copenhagen. A survey helped develop understanding of the content held by
CARARE partners and their technical situations. The project has successfully completed conceptual and
technical work to establish the technical architecture of the aggregation services and a CARARE metadata
schema; described in a set of technical deliverables published on the project website. Systems have been
implemented and are being tested ready to support ingestion and mapping of metadata and their storage on the
CARARE repository. Work has been underway to define a methodology for providing 3D and Virtual Reality
content to Europeana. After analysis of the content available, Europeana’s requirements and user needs,
CARARE has recommended 3D PDF as a publishing standard. CARARE has also completed a review of IPR
issues in the content domain and an analysis of the sustainability issues relating to digital content as the first
step in defining a sustainable business models for the aggregation service.
The project is now moving into the next phase with content partners actively planning to make the first
contents available for harvesting in 2011
