For two days app developers, designers and other digital innovators from across Ireland will compete against each other using Europeana's huge data resources to develop new applications.

Europeana have recently opened up their data to the public, meaning the material can be used for any purpose—creative, educational, commercial—with no restrictions in prototypes which they hope can be brought to market. The free availability of this data offers a new boost to the digital economy, providing electronic entrepreneurs with opportunities to create innovative apps and games for tablets and smartphones and to create new web services and portals and opportunities to combine Europeana data with data from other sectors such as tourism and broadcasting.

Welcoming the hack4Europe! Competition to Dublin Minister Deenihan said: "I am looking forward to seeing the creative uses for the data contained in Europeana which will be developed during this hackathon and the innovative uses the participants find for reusing the Europeana data. Europeana provides a valuable contribution to the European Commission's agenda to drive growth through digital innovation. Online open data is a core resource which can fuel enterprise and create opportunities for millions of Europeans working in Europe's cultural and creative industries.

"The sector represents 3.3% of EU GDP and is worth over €150 billion in exports. New and exciting opportunities for app developers, designers and other digital innovators have been created since the digital portal Europeana opened up its dataset of over 20 million cultural objects for free re-use. "I'm also delighted that Ireland is so strongly represented in the Europeana portal. With less than 1% of the European Union population we account for almost 5% of the cultural data in this important digital library, punching well above our weight—once again—on the international cultural stage."

Jan Molendijk, Technical and Operations Director, Europeana Foundation and a judge at the competition said: "It is always fascinating to see the creativity that is sparked by giving access to the riches of Europe's cultural heritage. And now that the metadata is released under a CC0 license, which means that anybody can use it for whatever purpose, including commercially, developers will have even more of an incentive to create innovative apps and websites."

The Minister will award the prizes at 5.30pm in the Science Gallery in Trinity College on Tuesday September 25th.

* Europeana—www.europeana.eu—is Europe's digital library, archive and museum. It currently gives people access to over 20 million books, paintings, films, recordings, photographs and archival records in 29 languages. It represents 2,200 partner organisations, including all the great national collections such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The Europeana platform and network of experts facilitate research and knowledge exchange between librarians, curators and archivists, and link them with digital innovators and the creative industries.

Europeana actively promotes the use and re-use of open data on the European stage and recognises the importance of clarity in this complex area. It has a Data Exchange Agreement (DEA) with each of its partner contributors that establishes that Europeana publishes metadata it receives from its data providers under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 waiver). The CC0 waiver is a legal tool that has been developed by Creative Commons for making data available without restrictions on re-use.

Europeana collects the descriptive metadata for the digital works it features; the works themselves and their digital representations remain with the relevant contributing organisation. The Europeana Licensing Framework sets out Europeana's approach to licensing its digital content, and was developed in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law, The Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg and Kennisland.