The work will begin with a survey to determine:

• the range of content
• metadata schema and approaches
• metadata harvesting activities
• and repository aggregation levels

in use by Europe’s museums, archives, libraries and other cultural content holders at local and regional level. This will be related to the recommended architecture of Europeana in order to arrive at a workable approach to metadata interoperability.

This will be followed by content analysis in each participating region, in order to identify cross-border and Pan-European ‘themes’ of importance to potential users and to assist with the prioritisation of the addition of new content for the Europeana service.

A test execution environment will be established, which local content providers or aggregators will be able to connect with. It will be consistent with and linked to Europeana, and will also allow partners to try out and test modifications which could be beneficial to Europeana. Harvesting of content will be tested and a central service will be established to manage and synchronize harvesting of content across the network of EuropeanaLocal servers.

Another strand of the project will focus on the planned and phased adoption of tools and standards as they are developed and released by Europeana. EuropeanaLocal will test the tools recommended by Europeana against the real-world environment of its content providers, customising the tools as required, providing relevant documentation and installation support and reviewing the output. In addition EuropeanaLocal will seek to broaden the Europeana toolset by identifying and testing suitable tools from the wider technical environment.

The project will provide and deliver training and project-long technical support service for EuropeanaLocal partners and content providers. This will cover best practice in installation, implementation and use of tools associated with OAI-PMH repositories, database conversion, metadata mapping, collection level description, vocabulary conversion using SKOS, rights expression and semantic enrichment. A series of workshops will be organised and a help desk established, together with the publication of best practice guidance.

An important part of the project will be dissemination and awareness raising which will promote the results and availability of the EuropeanaLocal service. It will also address future expansion and extension of Europeana. EuropeanaLocal will agree straightforward administrative and technical procedures whereby providers of content/metadata may become contributing members of Europeana, future governance mechanisms and procedures and a basis on which any charges, other costs or conditions of joining may be determined.

End users will be involved in the validation of the work of EuropeanaLocal through the establishment of a user testing groups in each partner region. These user groups will be called upon to carry out structured usability testing of Europeana prototype interfaces at various key stages of the project.