Bringing Environmental Culture Content into the Europeana.eu Portal: The Natural Europe Digital Libraries Federation Infrastructure

The aim of the Natural Europe project [1] is to improve the availability and relevance of environmental culture content for education and life-long learning use, in a multilingual and multicultural context. Cultural heritage content related with natural history, natural sciences, and nature/ environment preservation, is collected from six Natural History Museums (NHMs) around Europe into a federation of European Natural History Digital Libraries that is directly connected with Europeana.eu. We present here the Natural History Digital Libraries Federation infrastructure along with the appropriate tools and services that (a) allow the participating NHMs to uniformly describe and semantically annotate their content according to international standards and specifications, (b) interconnect their digital libraries, and (c) expose metadata records for Natural History cultural heritage objects to Europeana.eu.