Dublin, OH -- 21 October 2019. OCLC and Europeana, the digital platform for European cultural heritage, are working together to add records of millions of digitized items to WorldCat, making this open content easily discoverable and freely accessible to readers, researchers and students through libraries.

The addition of Europeana Collections will add dramatically to the open content resources that are accessible through WorldCat, the world's most comprehensive database of information about library collections.

Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research. Funded by the European Commission, Europeana provides free access to more than 50 million records of books, recordings, artwork and more, in a wide range of subject areas. Over 24 million of these are openly licensed and freely available for work, research and learning.

"Working to make Europe's cultural heritage available online for all—for learning, research or enjoyment—is what drives us at Europeana," said Harry Verwayen, Executive Director, Europeana. "Making Europeana Collections content available through OCLC, which shares our goal of making collections findable and accessible for everyone, takes us a step closer to that."

"We are thrilled to add rich, valuable resources from the Europeana Collections to WorldCat," said Suzanne Kemperman, OCLC Director, Business Development and Publisher Relations. "Libraries and library users want access to free and open content. With Europeana records in WorldCat, researchers can find and access this content by searching libraries' collections."

In addition to the Europeana, OCLC has agreements in place with over 360 publishers and content providers to facilitate discovery and access to key resources. More about OCLC partnerships with content providers is on the OCLC website.

About Europeana

Europeana is Europe's platform for digital cultural heritage with a mission to ‘transform the world with culture.' Europeana Collections is Europe's digital library, museum, gallery and archive. From books, photos and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects, Europeana Collections provides online access to a vast store of cultural heritage material from across Europe for everyone to find, use and share: for research, for learning, for creating new things. (@EuropeanaEU). The Europeana Foundation is the organisation tasked by the European Commission with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe. Europeana is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.

About OCLC

OCLC is a nonprofit global library cooperative providing shared technology services, original research and community programs so that libraries can better fuel learning, research and innovation. Through OCLC, member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the most comprehensive global network of data about library collections and services. Libraries gain efficiencies through OCLC's WorldShare, a complete set of library management applications and services built on an open, cloud-based platform. It is through collaboration and sharing of the world's collected knowledge that libraries can help people find answers they need to solve problems. Together as OCLC, member libraries, staff and partners make breakthroughs possible.