European LoCloud competition announced

The goal is to offer cultural institutions an opportunity to enrich their content and participate with increased flexibility and ease in Europeana - the online portal for European cultural heritage that provides access to millions of digitalised resources from museums, libraries, archives and European multimedia collections.

The general aim of LoCloud is to add over four million digital resources from European cultural institutions to Europeana. This project, which was launched on 1 March 2013, is a Best Practices Network of 32 partners that is financed by the European Commission and will remain in place for three years. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport is a partner in this project through the Directorate-General of Fine Arts, Cultural Heritage and Archives and Libraries.

Competition with two categories

The LoCloud competition consists of two categories:

1. My Local Heritage - this encourages workers at local cultural institutions, volunteers at local cultural institutions, local historians and students to explore a favourite place or part of their local history through the online resources of Europeana and to present their experience online via websites, a blog or even a video. Videos should not last more than 5 to 8 minutes.

2. My LoCloud Services - this is aimed at developers, aggregators and individual cultural institutions for them to offer a demonstration on the use of services developed on LoCloud.

Entries must be submitted by 1 October 2015.

The winners will receive their awards at the LoCloud final event, which will take place in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, on 5 February 2016.

The winners and finalists in each category will receive a tablet or a smartwatch. The winning entries will be published on LoCloud and Europeana.