Europe's Culture at a Click
Come 2010, Europeana will explode to contain 10 million items of Europe’s digitized cultural and scientific heritage. But fret not, the current Europeana prototype already has 4 million images, texts, videos and audio clips that you can surf through to your heart’s content. These include the treasures, some world famous, from museums such as the Louvre, Rijksmuseum and British Library. From the comfort of your home, you can view museum objects, like paintings and pictures, photographs, diaries and archival texts, films, newsreels and radio broadcasts. The content is not restricted to Europe. A quick dip into the Europeana site at time of writing brought me to Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon’s photograph of Tranquility Base, Neil Armstrong’s landing site; a requiem of Giuseppe Verdi, a 1997 poster from Leipzig Museum of Michael Jacksons’ History World Tour; the Rosetta Stone and other antiquities; and because Marc Chagall is one of my favourite artists, a search brought up over a thousand items. There is also a timeline where you can browse works through time, or you can select collections from specific museums. The European Commission project aims to bring together Europe’s culture through one portal, as well as boost the digital economy. Go to www.europeana.eu...
Intute
Intute is one of the most wide-ranging, free, and yet easy to use websites to carry out research into European studies. Intute’s subject specialists review and evaluate the thousands of resources, academic and otherwise, available on the internet, shortlist and and collates them into refereed links, saving students time in trawling through the web themselves. The modern languages and area studies page for instance is organised into area- specific studies or region clusters, so one can zero in on Central Europe, or specific countries like the UK or France, or the Balkans, Eastern, Western or Scandinavian Europe. Click on “European Union”, the user can filter the search by keyword and type such as ‘blogs’, ‘journals’, or ‘government publications’. It also cross-links to related sections such as EU public administration and law. There is also a section for visitor to develop Internet research skills through Virtual Training Suite tutorials, written by lecturers and librarians from universities across the UK. Visit www.intute.ac.uk...
The Federal Trust - EU Constitution
The Federal Trust is a think tank and another valuable resource that collates studies on the interactions between regional, national, European and global levels of government. The site has publications including full texts papers that are available free. For instance, its “EU Constitution” sub-site summarises the major developments, i.e., the signing of the Treaty, French and Netherlands votes and review. It also leads you to commentary and analyses, articles and speeches on the Lisbon and Reform Treaty and associated issues. From the menu of relevant links, you can move on to topic such as ‘Governance in the Eurozone’, ‘European Parliament’ and ‘Future of the Union’. Visit website...
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