Europeana’s Metis Sandbox

Revolutionizing Digital Cultural Heritage Data Integration

Discover the full impact and insights of Europeana’s Metis Sandbox, a transformative platform revolutionizing digital cultural heritage across Europe. By providing free access to over 58 million digitized records from more than 3,600 museums, libraries, and archives, it significantly improves data quality and the way cultural assets are curated and shared.

Geographic scope: Regional (Europe)
Topic/sector: Digital Cultural Heritage
Sandbox type: Operational
Year started: 2022
Sandbox status: In operation
№ of applications so far: around 11,500 datasets tested / 50-75 users

Duration of the sandbox: Each dataset takes around 1-2 hours to be tested

Who is behind this sandbox: Europeana, an European Union initiative, funded through the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility and contributions from its Member States. Its services, including the website, are managed by a consortium headed by the Europeana Foundation, operating under a service contract with the European Commission.

Website: Europeana Metis Sandbox User Guide

Overview of the Metis Sandbox

Launched as part of Europeana’s broader digital initiative, the Metis Sandbox addresses the complexities of integrating vast amounts of digital cultural heritage data. It provides immediate feedback on metadata quality and compliance, facilitating independent refinement by data providers, significantly streamlining the ingestion process onto Europeana’s platform.

Why Europeana created the sandbox

Europeana faced significant delays and resource strains due to manual quality checks on rapidly growing digital cultural heritage data. To address this, they created the Metis Sandbox, an automated system that accelerates quality assurance by reducing oversight, cutting feedback times from weeks to under an hour, and empowering data providers to detect errors early in the process.

How the sandbox works

The Metis Sandbox allows users to simulate the entire metadata ingestion process, providing immediate, automated feedback on data quality, compliance, and potential issues. Users can refine and resubmit their datasets until they meet the Europeana Data Model (EDM) standards, reducing validation feedback loops from weeks to under an hour.

Challenges addressed

To tackle key obstacles in managing vast digital heritage data, Europeana’s Metis Sandbox addresses several critical challenges: 

  • Manual and Intensive Quality Assurance: Automated checks replace labor-intensive manual oversight, speeding up the process.
  • Complexity of Metadata Integration: Immediate feedback and clear guidance simplify the integration of diverse datasets.
  • Limited Technical Resources: Allows data providers to independently correct metadata issues, freeing up Europeana’s technical team.

Results & insights

The Metis Sandbox has successfully processed approximately 11,500 datasets, boosting processing efficiency by an estimated 40%. Continuous evaluations have driven substantial upgrades to the performance, usability, and functionality of the tool.

Explore the full list of insights in the PDF
“Performance is one dimension, usability is another, and functional correctness is a third… we've evaluated, we've noticed that [the sandbox] grew, its appeal is a bit too strong for the kind of processing that was behind it. And we've decided to then take that and make it better.”
Jochen VermeulenJava Developer and Manager Aggregation Systems, Europeana
"Anticipate... that this can start leading its own life. Don’t look at it as an appendage to your real environment... but anticipate and even design and embrace that it can start leading its own life... It provides for more engagement and more quality at the end of the day."
Jochen VermeulenJava Developer and Manager Aggregation Systems, Europeana
"For every application that you make, every application, you need to keep a real good eye on who your users are, what they can and cannot do, what priority this has, how much this burdens them or unburdens them. You have to know them. You have to know whether they are daily users who will use the tool very intensively, or whether they are very occasional users who come to this tool maybe once in a year, because it makes a huge difference on how you design it and how you guide the users through their various use cases, through their flows"
Jochen VermeulenJava Developer and Manager Aggregation Systems, Europeana

Download the full case study

Interested in learning more about Metis Sandbox sandbox and its impact? Download the complete case study for more including success stories, impact, evaluation, and practical insights for sandboxers.

Download: Europeana Case Study

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Datasphere Initiative Foundation :

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices.

By downloading, you agree to receive updates on sandbox initiatives and insights from the Datasphere Initiative.

Explore other case studies: