Europeana
Europeana brings together digitised items from libraries, archives and museums across Europe. Through ScholarMuse an agent can search it by keyword, kind of material and year, and get each item's title, date, providing institution, country, rights statement, thumbnail and links to the Europeana page and the institution's own page. It shares one tool with the Library of Congress.
ScholarMuse tools: search_archives. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from Europeana.
search_archives
These are the fields on Europeana items. The same tool also returns Library of Congress items unless the agent limits sources to europeana. Each record's licence is the item's own rights statement.
- date
- Year of the item, when given
- kind
- Kind of material requested, or the media type
- mediaType
- Europeana media type, e.g. IMAGE or TEXT
- contributor
- Up to three creators, as names or vocabulary links
- institution
- Institution that provided the item
- aggregator
- Aggregator that passed it to Europeana
- place
- Place label, or the providing country
- country
- Country of the providing institution
- language
- Language codes of the item
- rights
- Rights statement URL for the item
- thumbnailUrl
- Preview image, when given
- providerUrl
- Item page on the institution's own site, when given
- titleEn
- English title, when Europeana has one that differs
- match
- any_word when no item matched every query word
- snippet
- First 500 characters of the description, when given
What it covers
- Cultural heritage items that European libraries, archives and museums have shared with Europeana: about 62.8 million records in the Search API on 13 October 2026.
- Search by keyword, optionally limited to images, or to Europeana's newspaper, manuscript or map themes.
- Results can be narrowed to a range of years.
- Every query word must match. When nothing matches all of them, the search is repeated for items matching any of the words, and those items are marked with match: any_word.
Limits
- At most 50 items per call (10 by default); when the Library of Congress is searched too, the two sources share that number.
- Only metadata, a thumbnail and links are returned. The snippet is the first 500 characters of the description, not the full text of the item.
- Each item has its own rights statement; check it before reusing an image.
- Metadata is in the language of the providing institution and is not translated, so titles, places and descriptions are often in French, German or Dutch. Searching in those languages finds more.
- The year filter only matches items that carry a year, so undated items drop out when dates are given.
How ScholarMuse reaches Europeana
The connector calls the Europeana Search API (record/v2/search.json) at api.europeana.eu with ScholarMuse's own API key sent in a request header. Without a configured key this source is skipped and the tool reports it as unavailable.
Responses are cached for up to 1 day, so newly added items can take a day to appear.
API key: the upstream API needs one; ScholarMuse uses its own, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Metadata CC0 1.0; each item has its own rights statement
Europeana (europeana.eu) and the providing institution named with each item.
Records that come from Europeana carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow Europeana's own citation guidance.
