Europeana is a multilingual digital collection containing more than 15 millions resources that lets you explore Europe's history from ancient times to the modern day. Europeana API services are web services allowing search and display of Europeana collections in your website and applications. The folks at Europeana have been actively promoting the experimentation with their APIs by organizing 'hackathons' - workshops for cultural informatics hackers where new ideas and discussed and implemented.

Some examples of the outputs of the previous hackathon can be found here. Hack4Europe is the most recent of these dissemination activities:

Hack4Europe! is a series of hack days organised by the Europeana Foundation and its partners Collections Trust, Museu Picasso, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Swedish National Heritage Board. The hackathon roadshow will be held simultaneously in 4 locations (London, Barcelona, Poznan and Stockholm) in the week 6 - 12 June and will provide an exciting environment to explore the potential of open cultural data for social and economic growth in Europe.

Each hackathon will bring together up to 30 developers from the hosting country and the surrounding area. They will have access to the diverse and rich Europeana collections containing over 18 million records, Europeana Search API (incl. a test key and technical documentation) and Europeana Linked Open Data Pilot datasets which currently comprise about 3 million Europeana records available under a CC0 license.

There are four hackathons coming up, so if you're interested make sure you sign up quickly:

• Hack4Europe! UK 9 June 2011, London, hosted by Collections Trust
• Hack4Europe! Spain 8 - 9 June 2011, Barcelona, hosted by Museu Picasso
• Hack4Europe! Poland 7 - 8 June 2011, Poznan, hosted by Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Kórnik Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• Hack4Europe! Sweden 10 - 11 June 2011, Stockholm, hosted by Swedish National Heritage Board