Europeana Sounds Project Independent Evaluation

Tender description

Europeana Sounds is a three year EC-funded project running between January 2014 and January 2017. The key objective of the project has been to open a gateway to Europe’s sound and music heritage and to increase its accessibility. In order to meet this objective, work was planned at the start of the project to: ● Increase the amount of audio content available via Europeana and improve geographical and thematic coverage by aggregating recordings with widespread popular appeal ● Improve their access by enriching descriptions, developing techniques for cross-media and cross-collection linking ● Develop audience-specific sound channels that will improve search facility, navigation and user experience ● Promote the creative reuse of recordings ● Identify and advocate recommendations on how to resolve domain constraints and improve access to out of commerce audio content, working with music publishers and rights holders ● Build a network of stakeholders: specialists in technology, rights issues, software development and sound archives. The network will expand to new content-providers and mainstream distribution platforms to ensure the widest possible availability. The activities of the project are organised within seven thematic work packages: aggregation, enrichment & participation, licensing guidelines, channels development, technical infrastructure, dissemination & networking and project management. The project is now nearing the end of its three year lifetime and the project management team would like to commission an independent evaluation that needs to discover which areas the project has been successful in and where improvements could be made. This evaluation will be shared in confidence solely with the project consortium. Its findings will feed into a final evaluation report to be written by the project management team in December 2016. If you are interested in participating in this tender please go to the British Library’s e-tendering portal at https://bl.bravosolution.co.uk, click on ‘View current opportunities and notices' link on the Home page and follow the on screen instructions in regards to registration and downloading the tender documents.