Many years of collaboration with cultural institutions allowed us to develop technical solutions which meet requirements of such institutions and allow for wide promotion of cultural heritage and collaboration with Europeana.
Until now to exist on the internet you had to invest in proper IT infrastructure, and this was possible mostly for big institutions, having proper funding. Smaller cultural institutions, often on their own cost or with the support of small grants, were digitizing their collections, but they could not afford to ensure constant on-line access to these resources. The result was that unique local heritage remain hidden and the only chance to discover it was to personally visit such a regional museum or private archive.
Thanks to the widespread of cloud technologies, we are now able to propose professional, but also very economical solution allowing also the smallest institutions to exist with their collections on the internet. LoCloud Collections platform allows quick and easy creation of your own digital library, museum or archive and publishing of your data to Europeana. This service is available in so called Software-as-a-Service model. It means that using LoCloud Collections does not require to own IT infrastructure and the payment for the service is periodic and depends on the extent of resources used on our platform, i.e. on the total amount of data which are made available on-line by particular institution.
While creating LoCloud Collections we wanted to ensure:
- Easy start with LoCloud – after registering in our service and filling in a simple form, in literally few minutes you can start to make your collections available on-line.
- Specificity of small cultural institutions is taken into account – our service is on one hand a professional system, and on the other it is easy to use, so if you want to start working with it, you don’t need a long training nor a lot of manuals reading.
- Support for many different collections – with LoCloud Collections you can put on-line many different collections and you can even build virtual exhibitions using objects from these collections.
- Support for many data formats – with LoCloud Collections you can publish photos, scans, text documents, as well as audio and video materials.
- The possibility to adjust end-user interface – when configuring your system of digital collections, you can choose one of predefined graphical templates, and then adjust it for your needs.
- Access to documentation and support – support for LoCloud Collections users is provided via portal available at http://support.locloud.eu/. Beside you can always ask us a question using the contact form.
- Fees dependent on the use of resources – the level of fees for using the LoCloud Collections service is defined by the chosen pricing plan. You can change that plan at any time, adjusting the storage space which is available for your actual needs.
- No need to make large financial investments – LoCloud Collections is based on our own professional IT infrastructure, so service users does not have to invest in hardware or software before starting to make their collections available on-line.
- Multilingualism – LoCloud Collections is fully prepared for having multilingual user interface. If we don’t offer the interface in your language yet, please let us know.
- Compatibility with Europeana – Europeana is a platform collecting information about collections of cultural heritage institutions, which are available on-line. Using LoCloud Collections you are sure that there will be no technical issues in providing information about your collections to Europeana.
- Access to advanced statistics about usage of collections – anyone who makes collections available on-line is interested in information about how much they are used. In LoCloud Collections we offer you access to dedicated analytical service, in which detailed information about the visitors traffic is automatically collected.
- Scalability – when you start to make your collections available on-line, you often don’t know how much object you will be able to publish at the end. Thanks to LoCloud Collections, you can start with the smallest pricing plan and gradually increase the available storage space, as your collections will grow.
- Constant access – thanks to the latest IT technologies, we can guarantee that your collections will be available on-line almost all the time (~99.9% service availability).
- Increased data safety – putting your digital collections to LoCloud Collections gives you one more backup copy, which you can use in case of problems with data stored locally.
- Visibility in search engines – websites based on LoCloud Collections are ready for automated crawling and indexing by robots, so that people can find your collections on Google and other popular search engines.
- Openness – when building LoCloud Collection, we use open source system Omeka. Thanks to this, you are sure that if sometime in the future you would like to stop using LoCloud Collections, you can use the same software to make our data available on-line somewhere else. Beside each collection in LoCloud Collections makes the data available via open API and OAI-PMH protocol.
We try to develop LoCloud collections continuously, so that all the time it is a professional, but easily accessible platform for publishing cultural heritage resources on-line. We hope that we will meet your expectations as well, helping you to promote your collections.
If you have any ideas for new features for our platform or you would like to send us your comments regarding the current offer, we encourage you to contact us!
LoCloud Collections Team