ASSETS will encourage new institutions to make their digital collections accessible through Europeana: thus ASSETS contributes to increase the digital items available on Europeana and to spread awareness about this great European challenge.

More to this, ASSETS will also encourage content creation by entirely reusable material so that users can enrich the library with the result of their search work. The overall goal is to make Europeana the most attractive, usable and effective gateway to free digital content worldwide!

ASSETS will provide the Europeana (www.europeana.eu ) with software services, applicable to all digital libraries, which include:

• Searching multimedia objects based on metadata and on content similarity
• Ranking algorithms for improved result display (including also a ranking function for object surrogates)
• Browsing multimedia objects for rapid navigation through semantic cross-links
• Audio content annotation and indexing (services for the automatic description and content enrichment of music audio data and for the fast retrieval of music audio content)
• Interfaces especially designed for interacting with multimedia objects
• Definition of an abstraction layer dedicated to search
• Planning long-term access to digital information
• Ingestion of metadata requiring normalization, cleaning, knowledge extraction and mapping to a common structure

The technology aspect of this project involves all the software services created by ASSETS to be available as Open Source code.

The project began in 2010 and will be completed in 2012.