Nearly a year into the Europeana Libraries project, this three day meeting in Belgrade was dominated by some intensive workshop sessions.

The meeting was a joint meeting attend by representatives from the network of the European Library and Europeana  Libraries project partners. The mix of national, university and other research libraries resulted in some valuable discussions in, and outputs from, each of the workshops.

The meeting, opened by hosts Vesna Injac and Stela Fillipi, commenced with a half day  information session. Jon Purday from the Europeana Foundation highlighted the achievements of the project so far, including surpassing our target for ingestion of content.

European Commission Officer Szymon Lewandowski outlined what was on the horizon in terms of potential future funding.

The day ended with the Europeana Libraries General Assemby session.

Day 2 of the meeting was used to gather input for the key deliverables for year 2 of Europeana Libraries. The Value Proposition workshop run by Harry Verwayen of Europeana examined what the key elements of the Europeana Libraries service should be. This was a particularly illuminating session, marked by a high level of interest and engagement from the participants. The feedback from this session will be fundamental in developing the future service.

Content development also activated quiet a lot of discussion. What came out of this session is how open minded libraries are about the type of content that should be available in the Europeana Libraries portal and that there is an awareness amoungst libraries that the nature of online research is changing.

Parallel sessions, focusing on more technical aspects were also held in Belgrade University Library. These focused on exciting developments in linked open data.

Day 3 focused on the end user. Susanna Lob and Jon Purday ran a workshop on Communicating with End Users. Some great ideas came out of this session. Many of which will be implemented on the coming years, so watch this space.

With this focus on the future in mind, Jay Jordan of OCLC gave a fitting and inspiring talk outlining the key trends that will affect libraries in the future. Open data, APIs, and cloud computing were just some of the issues highlighted by the OCLC president.

An inciteful workshop on the new European Library Website closed the meeting. Participants came up with use case scenarios for the portal based on their knowledge of their own end users. This workshop marked the commencement of the testing phase of the new European Library portal, which will be launched in 2012. 

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