Since September 2022, the Europeana Research Community and the EuropeanaTech Community have supported a Working Group on Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets. The Working Group addresses a critical matter for cultural heritage institutions managing digital collections, that is, providing data reusers with the context needed for reusing data.
Specifically, the working group has focused on datasheets as a standardised publication format for documenting datasets (for example, corpora of digitised books and newspapers, bibliographic datasets, digitised artworks), with the goal to support cultural heritage institutions and other data providers to describe their data assets in a way compliant with the FAIR principles, enabling an efficient inclusion into reuse workflows. This focus has also brought forward the efforts to affirm a ‘Collection as Data’ approach in the common European data space for cultural heritage, concretely expressed by the development of the ‘Collections as Data’ workflow, in which documentation is addressed as one of the ten steps suggested for curating datasets.
After realising their datasheet template – Version 1 in September 2023, and presenting it at events across Europe, this year the Working Group members have organised a series of workshops to test and refine the template with professionals and researchers interested in digital curation across and beyond the Europeana Initiative. This series included a workshop with those working on similar initiatives in Europe (such as data envelopes at the KNAW | The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and a highly attended workshop open to the public embedded into the programme of the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum meeting in Spring.
This approach – nurtured by the spirit of the Europeana communities that are based on knowledge-sharing and bottom-up development of the cultural heritage sector – led to the release of the datasheet template – Version 2 in July 2025.
What’s new in Version 2
The new datasheet template is structured in six sections, which combine technical and ethical aspects that documentation should take into account: title, description, distribution, composition, data collection process, examples and considerations for using the data. While the core aims of the template remain the same, Version 2 brings several structural improvements. The updated version features a modular information architecture organised into three levels of depth, with a minimal set of mandatory fields. This design allows the template to better accommodate the diversity and complexity of digital heritage collections and to be used meaningfully across very different types of datasets, while clearly indicating what is known, unknown and not applicable.
In addition to these structural updates, Version 2 takes the first steps toward machine-readability, in line with the current developments around the common European data space for cultural heritage. Fields identified as mandatory within the template have been mapped to the Data Catalogue Vocabulary Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP), a specification for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Aligning with this standard enables discoverability in data portals and compatibility with automated workflows, while keeping the primary focus of the template on human readability and usability.
What’s next and how to get involved
The Working Group continues to refine the template, focusing on interoperability and facilitating its adoption. Current priorities include an overall alignment with DCAT-AP, and gathering new use cases, whilst developing an open-source tool to support the creation of documentation for datasets, which will be finalised and made available in open source by next year. The datasheet template – Version 2 will serve as a basis to define minimum requirements for sharing datasets through the upcoming data catalogue of the common European data space for cultural heritage.
Explore the datasheet template – Version 2, try it out in your own context, and share your feedback by writing an email to [email protected]! Your contributions will help shape the next steps in this community-driven project.
Meet the Working Group on site or online at Fantastic Futures 2025
Working Group representatives will present these updates at the Fantastic Futures 2025 conference organised by AI4LAM and hosted at the British Library on 3–5 December 2025, in a lightning talk highlighting Version 2 within a group of initiatives focusing on documenting datasets: Write it down! Fostering Responsible Reuse of Cultural Heritage Data with Interoperable Dataset Descriptions. Tickets for online attendance are now available for free – register now.