Knock: Keeping and Nurturing Open Connections and Knowledge

In a cultural and digital innovation perspective, "Knock" aimed to create new services and products to be harvested by Europeana to encourage the knowledge and the appreciation of European cultural heritage. "Knock" aimed to reinforce and capitalize the sense of belonging to the deeply rooted, vital and active European space based on common history and values by producing concrete interoperable examples of reuse of cultural material in the fields of tourism, creative industries, education and research. The Action focused on increasing cultural contents available through Europeana; improving their usability; widening the users basin; encouraging and supplying tools to contents providers; enabling the cultural resources to become factors of sustainable social and economic development; giving visibility to relevant digitized resources and cultural heritage across national boundaries. Planned objectives: putting online digitized resources according to a shared open source architecture; creating a community of open repositories of archives too small to singularly connect to Europeana but too relevant to stay invisible; improving the end-user experience by supplying a participatory platform and by upgrading search tools. "Knock" would better the skills of content providers and end-users through online open guides and e-learning platforms. This will allow more content holders to connect and to develop mechanisms, relationships and processes for distributing improved data, bettering their own and their institution's capacity building. Considering the educational value of cultural heritage, communication strategy focuses on reaching a wider community of users and the general public, on bettering users browsing and searching experience, on disseminating best practices on information technology for digital humanities through a network of small but highly operational repositories. "Knock" tools would also link the heritage to its territory to boost cultural tourism.