ABOUT

Culture Cam is a webcam based similarity search tool offering designers, artists and all creative people the possibility to explore cultural heritage images on Europeana in a fun, playful and intuitive way.

Take a photo of any object, texture - or even yourself - with your webcam, and Culture Cam will provide you with a set of images that are similar or related in colour, shape or pattern. You may very likely retrieve unexpected search results leading to further exploration of Europeana content. That's what Culture Cam is all about!

The images in Culture Cam come from selected datasets that are available via Europeana. These dataset are all very suitable for creative re-use and are thus also featured on Europeana labs, a playground for remixing and using cultural and scientific heritage. Europeana is the network for the cultural heritage sector in Europe, sharing the dream of a world where every citizen will have access to all cultural heritage. The network of data providing partners currently encompasses more than 3,000 museums, galleries, libraries and archives from all over Europe, providing almost 40 million metadata records that are available via the Europeana Portal and API.

Use Culture Cam for inspiration for your creative works, dive into our common cultural heritage and feel free to re-use heritage content as sources for new derivative designs and art artefacts. All items in Culture Cam are under public domain, or there is no known copyright.

Culture Cam has been developed by the Danish design company Spild af Tid in collaboration with Aalto University and the Austrian Institute of Technology as part of Europeana Creative, a co-funded project by the European Union enabling and promoting greater re-use of digital cultural heritage resources made available through Europeana.

CONTENT

Culture Cam is based on open images and data from Europeana and Europeana Labs. All searchable images in Culture Cam are under a public domain. This no-known-copyright or copyrights expired content is free for re-use. Although, as in all creative works, it is a good practice to tell others where the original images come from and give your name so people can attribute you when sharing your work.

FEEDBACK

Culture Cam is a working prototype and we would like to hear your comments and feedback on how to make it work better. Please send your message to the Europeana Creative project: europeanacreative@onb.ac.at.

We are also very interested to see your search results, so we can better optimize the search algorithms used in the prototype. You can share a screenshot via email to europeanacreative@onb.ac.at or on Twitter or Facebook using #culturecam.