Tourism Benefits from a Cultural Heritage Partnership Between Europeana and Google's Field Trip

Tourism beneﬁts from a cultural heritage partnership between Europeana and Google’s Field Trip

Europeana and Google’s Niantic Labs have partnered to bring to surface selected Europeana cultural institutions in Google’s Field Trip app. Now, tourists from around the world can use Field Trip to view and learn about archaeological sites, historical buildings and important monuments in Poland, Estonia and Sweden.

The FieldTrip app is developed by Google’s Niantic Labs for iPhone, Android mobile devices, allowing users to explore and discover more about their surroundings. Available in over 30 languages, Field Trip uses Google’s geolocation technology to provide interesting information to travelers as they explore the world around them including local history, fun facts about art and architecture, hidden gem restaurants and much more.

Recognising the untapped potential of matching culture and innovative technologies, Europeana and Google’s Niantic Labs began a pilot project in 2014 to add brand new and unique European cultural content to the Field Trip app. Three Europeana partners, the Swedish National Heritage Board, the National Heritage Board of Estonia and the National Heritage Board of Poland joined the pilot to share their curated and enriched collections on Google’s Field Trip.

For sending datasets to the FieldTrip app, Europeana developed a function to export, via their API, a tailored RSS feed, in the format required for Google Field Trip. As part of this work, a mapping from Europeana's metadata format to Field Trip's format was created.

“Strategically, we want to enable and promote the creative reuse of cultural content in the tourism sector. The pilot project with Google’s Niantic Labs marks our successful entry into this key market and is the ﬁrst step in building solid and productive relationships between cultural institutions and the digital tourism industry. Making Europeana collections available on the Google’s Field Trip app allows memory institutions to have greater visibility, wider outreach and deeper engagement with their audiences.” - Jill Cousins, Executive Director at Europeana

“Through the partnership with Europeana we can now tap into a large and diverse network of European heritage institutions and the cultural wealth they have to share. That means we can add more trusted partners to our publisher list and oﬀer Field Trip users new and rich stories about cultural treasures as they travel throughout Europe.” - Gijs van der Hulst, Senior Manager New Business development at Google Niantic Labs

Following the successful completion of this pilot, Europeana is working to add other cultural institutions’ material to Field Trip and is encouraging members of its network to join this partnership.

With this collaboration, Europeana facilitates the further distribution and promotion of the data providers content to a wider audience and provides an added value in the sense that cultural institutions would probably not go through this process on an individual basis. Europeana

Europeana is Europe's digital platform for cultural heritage, collecting and providing online access to tens of millions of digitised items from libraries, archives, audiovisual collections and museums across Europe. The network, represents more than 2,500 cultural heritage organisations and a thousand individuals from these and other walks of life including the creative and technical sectors, all passionate about bringing Europe's vast wealth of cultural heritage to the world.

Google’s Niantic Labs

Niantic Labs is a startup within Google dedicated to creating mobile apps that connect people with the real world. Founded by John Hanke, who previously helmed the Google Geo team (including Maps and Earth), Niantic is focused on creating applications that inspire real world adventure, exploration, and social interaction. Niantic Labs has launched two products, Field Trip and Ingress, and is currently developing its next interactive entertainment experience, Endgame.

Contact persons at Europeana

Eleanor Kenny, [email protected], Head of Corporate Communications

Milena Popova, [email protected], Project Lead