Introducing Narratives in Europeana: Preliminary Steps

We present some preliminary steps towards the introduction of narratives as first-class citizens in digital libraries. The general idea is to enrich the digital libraries with events providing a rich contextualisation of the digital libraries’ objects. More specific motivations are presented in the paper through a set of use cases by different actors who would benefit from using narratives for different purposes. We then consider a specific digital library, Europeana, the largest European digital library in the cultural domain. We discuss how the Europeana Data Model should be extended for representing narratives. We present a tool supporting the creation and the visualisation of narratives and we show how the tool has been employed to create a narrative of the life of the painter Gustav Klimt.