Ontotext launched bulgariana.eu, an agregator to publish Bulgarian cultural heritage in the European virtual library Europeana. It has a digital repository to preserve and present cultural objects and their metadata to the public. The first two collections of Bulgariana – Golden pages of the Bulgarian Revival and Pra-historic and Thracian Civilizations – will be published in Europeana in the beginning of March 2012. This initiative is co-financed by ITCC – the Korean-Bulgarian IT Cooperation Centre – operating in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The goals of Bulgariana are to:

• improve communication between Bulgarian organizations working in the cultural heritage domain
• improve technical and organizational collaboration
• share information about funding possibilities and calls
• work together on proposals and projects
• concentrate and focus the efforts of the Bulgarian cultural heritage community
• provide a default platform for IT research related to cultural heritage, and an opportunity for small museums and other institutions to host their collections

The Bulgarian National radio broadcast “Bulgarian Touches in the European Landscape: “Digital Europe” presented bulgariana.eu as part of the European initiative of digitalization of the European cultural heritage on February 8th 2012 in a conversation with Dr Mariana Damova, one of the originators of Bulgariana (beginning at minute 12’15″).