Last week, we updated the Europeana portal with over two million more items!

Europeana gathers content from over 2,200 providers (galleries, libraries, archives, museums and audiovisual collections), via a range of aggregation initiatives and projects. Some bring together content on a regional or national level, others collect content on a particular theme (such as Jewish heritage, art nouveau or natural history).

In this release, there are some major additions from CARARE (archaeological monuments), ECLAP: the e-Library for Performing Arts, Heritage of the People’s Europe (social history), Linked Heritage (a wide range of content from both private and public sectors), OpenUp! (natural history heritage), and The European Library. Browse all new content.

So, let’s explore some of it…

Over 12,000 items have been added to the collection from Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library). This collection includes great maps from the 1600s. Here’s one of Bavaria in 1607.

There is also new content from the Biblioteca de Catalunya – one of the partners who have contributed to our popular Pinterest boards – including a series of handwritten letters from 1848 between Spanish poet and linguist, Marià Aguiló, and Tomàs Aguiló. There are also 15th century manuscripts and religious publications such as this ‘Rationale divinorum officiorum’.

The e-Library for Performing Arts’ collections include performing art material coming from theatre, dance, music, cinema and film. To pick just a couple of new additions is hard, but how about this video of ‘7DUST’, a play in which art, politics and other excesses converge, performed in 2003? And I really like a series of newly added photographs called ‘I’m Lost’. Here’s one of them:

From Linked Heritage, here’s a 1945 drawing titled ‘Mobilised for reconstruction’, by Marat Samsonov, people’s artist of Russia, from the collections of the Museum – Cyclorama ‘Kursk Battle. Belgorod Direction’.

The CARARE contribution includes over 180,000 texts from the German Archaeological Institute and some fascinating content from Pompeii La Fortuna Visiva – a project that is researching the representations of Pompeii – including illustrations, photographs and architectural drawings. And elsewhere, there are great photographs of architecture in the Czech Republic – here’s just one:

From the OpenUp! project, there are substantial contributions from, amongst others, the Natural History Museum in Vienna and the National Botanic Garden in Belgium. Here, for example, is a delightful drawing of an anacardium occidentale, otherwise known as a cashew.

Finally, The European Libary’s contribution this month includes collections from the national libraries of France, Serbia, Latvia, Switzerland, Italy and Wales. From the last collection, a fantastic photograph wonderfully titled ‘Man with an artificial leg who became a by-word as a director of traffic in Caernarfon’.

Enjoy your explorations – don’t forget you can explore what’s new in Europeana at any time using our ‘New Content‘ listings page.