SearchCulture.gr Greek National Aggregator of Digital Cultural Content

Overview

SearchCulture.gr is Greece's national portal for aggregating and providing open access to digital cultural heritage and contemporary artistic production. Developed and operated by the National Documentation Centre (EKT), it serves as a unified discovery environment for diverse cultural collections spanning prehistoric times to the present. Since 2018, EKT has been the accredited national aggregator for the European digital library Europeana, through which SearchCulture.gr delivers Greek cultural content to international audiences.

History and Founding

The platform was built by EKT starting in 2013, using a bespoke Java-based software platform designed and implemented in-house by EKT's scientific and information technology teams. SearchCulture.gr was initially created as a service for beneficiaries of Greek national digitization project calls under the 'Digital Convergence' programme. It has been progressively upgraded, including through the Europeana Common Culture project (2019–2020) and a major infrastructure project (2020–2023) funded under the NSRF Operational Programme for Public Sector Reform. In 2024, the platform reached the milestone of one million aggregated items.

Collections and Holdings

SearchCulture.gr hosts over 150 digital collections from more than 110 content-provider institutions across Greece, amounting to over one million items. The collections encompass a wide range of media types including photographs, artworks, costumes, music scores, artefacts, magazines, manuscripts, maps, videos, and three-dimensional models. Content spans all periods of Greek history and culture. Participating institutions include the National Gallery, the Greek Literary Historical Archive, the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, museums, archives, libraries, and antiquities authorities.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism and Media

SearchCulture.gr aggregates digitized magazines, periodicals, audiovisual records documenting intangible cultural heritage, and film festival materials. Its collections are accessible under open data principles, supporting research and creative reuse by journalists, scholars, and the public.

Access and Usage

SearchCulture.gr is freely accessible online with advanced search and navigation capabilities, including timeline browsing, hierarchical navigation by type and historical period, and semantic enrichment enabling multilingual search. The platform offers a public API (with registration for an API key) and exposes data as Linked Open Data following the Europeana Data Model (EDM). Collections are also accessible through Europeana's pan-European portal.