It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users.

[1][2] The letter helped to give added support to work that the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate had already been conducting over the previous ten years, such as the Telematics for Libraries project.

[1][3] The first project that started the building of Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), whose role was to establish a prototype model for a user-focussed service, capable of working across national borders and across differing domains.

It ran for 2.5 years and, by 2010, the initial prototype had developed into a full service, providing access to over 10 million digital records of cultural objects.

The digital objects that users can find in Europeana are not stored on a central computer, but remain with the cultural institution and are hosted on their networks.

To make the information searchable, it has to be mapped to a single common standard, known as the Europeana Semantic Elements, and based on Dublin Core.

This metadata standard at present takes a lowest common denominator approach to the integration of different types of digital content.

[13][14] Records of over 10 million cultural and scientific artefacts have been brought together on Europeana's platform, and are presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users, such as smartphones or APIs.

[citation needed] The Foundation promotes collaboration between museums, archives, audiovisual collections and libraries so that users can have integrated access to their content through Europeana and other services.

[citation needed] The Foundation is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana[18] and is housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands.