LODissea
A journey through european(a)
A journey through european(a)
Europeana is a shared digital space where millions of cultural artifacts - paintings, photographs, manuscripts, films and sounds - from thousands of institutions across Europe converge into a vast and open sea. It sits at the heart of the EU's common data space for cultural heritage, anchored by three principles: heritage that's easy to find and reuse, a network built on shared contribution rather than a single institution, and data cared for with the same precision as the objects it describes.
These are the values Europeana states about itself, but do they hold beneath the surface? Is contribution genuinely mutual and spread across many institutions, or concentrated between few providers? Is the underlying data as reliable as claimed, consistently and equally across countries?
There is only one way to answer those questions: dive deep and see whether Europeana's promise holds against its own data.
Our journey charts a course across six shores - Germany, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy - each different in size, coastline and culture, each hiding its own treasures.
Together they form a mixed fleet, giving us the range needed to see how differently data can take shape across Europeana's sea.
Do Europeana providers reflect the number of GLAM institutions?
We began our exploratory journey by mapping the digital participation of cultural institutions in Europeana across the selected countries. Using Wikidata as a baseline, we tracked how many institutions successfully navigate into the Europeana ecosystem, and how many remain stranded on isolated shores.
GLAM Institutions Participation Rate
By removing absolute volume differences and viewing participation as a proportion, this distribution exposes a severe digital divide. Across all six observed nations, the vast majority of physical cultural institutions remain offline, lost in the sea of unlinked data.
Do active provider rates and total Europeana volume correlate positively with national cultural investment?
In the next chart, we explore whether financial investment actually steers the tide within this drop of providers in an ocean of institutions. By mapping public spending against both the participation rate and total artifact volume, we investigate who truly holds the rudder of European digital heritage.
Investment Correlation
Portugal's initial partecipation rate (7.22%) is artificially inflated because crowdsourced Wikidata only records 554 physical institutions, far below the 3,395 verified in the official INE administrative census.
When we override the denominator using the official census baseline, the rate drops to 1.18%. Clicking the button below visually shifts Portugal's bubble to the left, revealing the true macroeconomic correlation.
Once the Portugal census override is applied, a clear linear trajectory emerges between public spending and institutional mobilization: nations that invest more of their GDP in culture generally bring a larger proportion of their physical GLAMs into the Europeana ecosystem. However, evaluating bubble size (artifact volume) exposes a striking divergence. France is a primary outlier, leading all observed countries in cultural investment (1.40% of GDP), yet its mobilization rate remains suppressed at 1.89%, contributing a modest 4.7M items.
France's contribution reveals a single ship doing much of the work: the Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
But is France an exception, or does Europeana's sea rely on a handful of large vessels carrying entire
national fleets? To
answer this, we turn from countries to providers and examine who is really steering Europe's digital
heritage.
Who sends knowledge to the Europeana sea?
Behind the vast archive of Europeana stand 1002 providers from the six selected countries, each loading their cultural treasures onto the digital vessel. But who sails Europeana's waters, and how heavily loaded is each provider?
High Tide, Low Tide
Top Providers
From this point on, the analysis follows the group of providers responsible for the overwhelming majority of items in each country, leaving out a long tail of low-volume contributors that add noise rather than insight.
Where Digitization Happens
Concentration leaves its mark on the map as well. Mapping the top 20 providers in each country reveals distinct geographical patterns.
Two of the top 20 providers - Internet Archive and IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library - are based outside Europe. These appear to act as digital aggregators rather than individual cultural institutions, collecting content from multiple sources before contributing it to Europeana.
Yet a map can only tell us where the ships set sail, not who is aboard them and what treasures they
carry.
To answer that, we leave the map behind and step aboard the vessels
themselves.
What kinds of knowledge sail these waters?
Not every vessel sails with the same inventory. We look at how items are distributed across institution categories - libraries, archives, museums, natural history collections, audiovisual archives, and more - comparing composition to reveal each nation's cultural identity through its data.
Category Composition by Country
Each provider is classified into an institution-type category derived from the data itself, rather than defined upfront. Classification draws primarily on the provider's Wikidata entity - its description, name, and structured properties - enriching Europeana's own records with an external, linked open data source.
Exploring Europeana's data reveals a clear limitation: categories aren't perfectly aligned across providers. This difficulty led us toward a more fundamental question: the quality and completeness of Europeana's metadata itself.
Discover how well France does
In Europeana, Content Tier tells us about the quality of the digital object itself, while Metadata Tier tells us how well that object can be understood and connected.
How reliable is the data beneath the surface?
The two scores are meant to work together, but they often tell different stories.
The Netherlands sails ahead in Content Tier, but loses ground when it comes to
metadata.
Italy and Germany chart the richest metadata, despite following very
different courses in content quality.
Portugal is the only country that does not reach Metadata Tier C, the level Europeana
recommends for navigating its collections as a knowledge base rather than simply searching them.
But the deeper we sail, the more one question surfaces: who is willing to share?
How Open Is Each Country's Digitized Heritage?
Europeana was built as a shared sea of cultural heritage. In these waters, openness is more than a legal detail, it is part of quality itself. The fewer the copyright restrictions attached to an object, the greater its potential for education, research, and creative reuse, and the further it can travel through Europeana's ecosystem.
Reflecting on the journey
When we set sail on this exploratory journey to map how European cultural heritage (GLAM) institutions navigate the Europeana ecosystem, our voyage uncovered a digital landscape defined by stark disparities and untapped potential. We first encountered a severe participation deficit, realizing that only a drop in the vast ocean of European institutions actively shares their collections on the platform. Crucially, our analysis revealed that macroeconomic cultural investment does not steer digital volume; high-spending leaders like France contribute surprisingly few data providers and artifacts. As we charted the pattern of these contributions, we observed the "Flagship" phenomenon, where almost every nation's digital fleet is dominated by a massive lead provider anchored heavily in capital cities and primary cultural hubs. Further exploration across providers typology uncovered that while libraries command the highest overall volume of shared objects, specialized repositorieslike audiovisual archives emerge as exceptionally active navigators. Finally, looking beneath the surface of the data, we struck the quality and openness shallow: the vast majority of artifacts floating on the platform remain trapped in low content tiers and restrictive copyright schemas.
Europeana is an extraordinary collaborative infrastructure - a vessel designed not just for data storage, but for cross-border knowledge discovery. However, an empty harbor serves no maritime trade. If Member States don’t participate in an active collaborative ecosystem, the immense financial and technical effort behind European Linked Open Data is lost. European and national policymakers should first understand the underlying frictions currently impeding institutional participation.
At present peripheral and regional heritage remains digitally invisible because smaller organizations often lack the infrastructure required to independently map, standardize, and ingest their catalogs into European aggregators. This exclusionary dynamic extends beyond geography into institution type. The same concentration that determines who contributes also shapes what gets preserved: cultural heritage on Europeana skews toward traditional, document-based forms at the expense of a genuinely diverse range of heritage types. What appears on the platform seems shaped less by deliberate curatorial choice than by structural and external factors that have little to do with what a country actually values as heritage. As a result, Europeana's national profiles cannot be read as a reliable reflection of cultural identity: what looks like a country's heritage priorities may instead be an artifact of which institutions happened to digitize the most.
Finally, even when collections successfully reach the platform, many remain anchored by low-quality metadata and restrictive copyright licenses. While improving metadata requires technical expertise, institutional resources and investment, it’s ultimately a challenge that can be addressed through training and digital infrastructure. Openness, by contrast, depends largely on the broader national legal framework governing copyright and reuse. By embracing both Linked Open Data principles and more permissive licensing policies, cultural institutions could move closer to Europeana's original vision: a shared cultural commons where access to heritage empowers people and benefits society.
Reconsider the assumption that high national cultural spending automatically results in digital openness, and recognize that financial investment must be paired with intentional open-data strategies.
Collaborate across borders and institutional scales—connecting major national "flagships" with peripheral archives to share technical infrastructure and data-mapping expertise.
Empower smaller and specialized cultural institutions by providing them with the tools to share their catalogs directly on the European stage.
Promote and implement policies that prioritize high-tier data quality and true legal openness, ensuring that digital heritage is not merely stored, but can be actively reused by the global community.
LODissea is an exploratory research, investigating the open and collaborative environment of Europeana. Specifically, we examine the scale and distribution of data providers, analyzing who they are and what institutional categories they represent, and the overall structural quality of their data. The selected countries for this study are: Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands. Data retrieved from Europeana are enriched using Wikidata and Eurostat databases.
The project has been carried out for the final exam of Information Visualization, within the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge course at the University of Bologna.
All additional material produced for the project can be found in the Github Repository.
All team members collaborated across every phase of the project - data collection, data cleaning, visualization, storytelling and web development - with responsibilities shared to keep the workload balanced throughout the research process.
| Source | Used for | License |
|---|---|---|
| Europeana | Provider metadata, item counts, institution profiles | Metadata: CC0; individual items retain their own rights statements |
| Wikidata | Institution type, descriptions, geographic data | CC0 (public domain) |
| Eurostat | Demographic and investment context | Reuse authorised with attribution, per Decision 2011/833/EU |
| INE | Institution data for Portugal | CC BY 4.0 |
amCharts 5 has been used to build the interactive charts of the website, under its free license (attribution required).
Original content on this site - text, design, analysis and visualizations - is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Underlying source datasets remain governed by their own terms.
