SearchCulture.gr

SearchCulture.gr is now one of the most popular of EKT’s services and is one of the major hubs for the aggregation of digital cultural heritage content. It already hosts over 160,000 items from 56 collections of 43 of the country’s institutions, and has had more than 140,000 visits from individuals over the past two years.

Searchculture.gr is backed by a strong network of organisations. Museums, archives, libraries, ephorates of antiquities and other cultural entities, public and private, provide organised digitised cultural and historical material so as to increase visibility and searchability of their content, while simultaneously promoting Greek cultural heritage in general.

The resources that make up the collections include texts, sound, images, videos, cartographic material or items created in digital form (eg interactive games) and chronologically cover all periods of Greek history and arts.

The open web portal SearchCulture.gr disseminates content according to Linked Open Data specifications and offers the public innovative advanced search capabilities including:

1. multi-lingual search and time criteria
2. hierarchical or multi-lingual navigation and filtering
3. innovative interactive applications
   
   Why contribute?
   
   • A major hub of Greek cultural content and already being frequently visited, Searchculture.gr increases the discoverability of your individual collections. In addition, your content becomes part of a broader framework of prestigious cultural content and thus its value is further enhanced.
   • Your organisation and collection are displayed on the item tab and the network page. For each item tab there are redirect links to the site of your organisation, the site for the collection and the original item tab of the collection, thus increasing traffic for you’re your organisation and searchculture.  EKT enriches the content available at searchculture.gr with references using a bilingual vocabulary to improve its searchability. This means that even if your content is only in Greek, it can be searched by English speaking visitors thanks to EKT’s semantic enrichment.
   • Searchculture.gr has advanced navigation and search capabilities (advanced search, timeline, hierarchical navigation of types and historical periods, result filters etc).
   • If requested, content is made available to the European digital culture library Europeana, which ensures the international showcasing of content and increased visits via redirect links.

   Note that Searchculture.gr was initially created as a service for beneficiaries of the Calls 31 and 31.2 (SaaS project) of the ‘Digital Convergence’ programme who implemented digitisation and documentation projects for their repository content. Now that SearchCulture.gr has been completed, it is constantly enriched with new collections and additional functionality making it the largest aggregator for digital cultural content in the country and contributor to the European Digital Library, Europeana.