A Game with a Purpose to Access Europe's Cultural Treasure

Europeana, the European aggregator for digital cultural heritage objects spends huge effort on providing access to the vast collection of Europe’s Culture. While the content has been made available online, it still needs to be disseminated. We propose a “games with a purpose” approach to engage people with this tremendous collection and make them discover European culture. This approach is implemented by a question and answering system, in which players create questions that are answered by specific Europeana resources. Other players can then use a search interface to Europeana to find the particular resource that is needed to answer the question. This concept provides a low level entrance to cultural heritage for end users. Moreover it reveals human search strategies on Europeana that can be exploited to support and improve the search experience of other users on Europeana and helps to identify objects of interest by analyzing usage data.