Olaf Janssen

I strongly believe ultimately people want to know who they really are. For that they explore their identities, histories & origins. I help them in discovering & understanding these worlds by making our cultural & scientific heritage as open & usable as possible.

I develop innovative products & services for Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands.

Keywords : Open Data, dataservices, GLAMwiki and social platforms.

I’m a Europeana-pioneer; I was an all-round project manager in the first years of the EU’s flagship online museum, library, film theatre and archive. I’ve managed large EU-funded projects that expanded the cooperative cultural networks across the continent and added millions of new digital objects to Europeana.eu.

Before moving to Europeana, I was one of the founders of The European Library, the collaborative platform and joint webservice of the national and academic libraries of Europe. After launching the site in 2005, I was responsible for several EU-funded projects that successfully integrated 40 national libraries and hundreds of their collections into TheEuropeanLibrary.org.

I’ve given presentations and lectures across Europe, Asia and the USA.

Before moving into cultural heritage, I studied astronomy at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Off-work interests: Triathlon, ice skating, acting, photography and (g)astronomy