Electronic libraries: Europeana launched the new projects

Europeana Art and Exhibitions have announced the launch of Art Nouveau season. Until the end of May the depth and diversity of this influential art movement will be explored, inviting public to enjoy its beautiful jewelry, bookplates and posters.

The season is led by a major new exhibition featuring almost 50 artworks from more than 20 museums, and showcasing famous masterpieces alongside lesser-known works. The exhibition presents an overview of international Art Nouveau style from its origins to its brilliant heyday across Europe, known as Jugendstil in Norvegian, Modernisme - in Catalan, Szecesszió – in Hungarian, L'Art Nouveau, Stile Floreale or Stile Liberty - Italian, Skønvirke - Danish and so on.

Throughout the season Europeana will be publishing a series of focused on specific aspects of Art Nouveau guest blogs, contributed specially by partner institutions. In these blogs, museum curators and collections managers will share fascinating stories about the people with their visions, which shaped Art Nouveau.

Europeana Music Collections of this month are focused on anthropology and its links with sounds and music studies, in France and in the world.

Ethnomusicologists seek to understand what is music and its purpose. In order to study the cultural and social aspects of musicians, they need to collect field recordings. In this Music Collections, you can explore the work of ethnomusicologists through four sound collections of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Two collections are provided by the MMSH sound archive center, which holds multidisciplinary field recordings collections focused on the Mediterranean area: a collection of “Songs from South of France” sung in a variety of languages - Occitan, French, Italian and Italian dialects, and a selection of Songs from South of Sahara in Arabic, Tamahaq and Tamasheq.

The CRESSON collection exposes this pluridisciplinary approach and focuses on the sound dimension from the scale of architectural device, housing, district, to the scale of sound identity of cities. The Phonobase (www.phonobase.org) collection will also be on Europeana, and will offer you a trip in the past. It gathers 10 000 sound excerpts and photos taken from early cylinders and records produced from 1888 to 1920 approximately, and distributed in France and Europe.

This spring Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe's galleries, museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections, sharing on treasures from open content archives and events it is working on.