Not just another portal, not just another digital library: A portrait of Europeana as an application program interface

To the general public, Europeana is primarily perceived as a portal exposing a great amount of cultural heritage information. Even though this perception is not entirely misleading, the main goal of Europeana is rather to build an open services platform enabling users and cultural institutions to access and manage a large collection of surrogate objects representing digital and digitized content via an application program interface (API). The paper covers some details of the overall data space schema, of the API description and of the Europeana Portal implementation; it also discusses use cases and the mental approach that users, in particular cultural institutions, should adopt to completely exploit the potential of the Europeana services platform together with a discussion of related risks. The authors represent key players in the Europeana specification, development and implementation process currently under way.