Not (just) a repository, nor (just) a digital library, nor (just) a portal: a portrait of Europeana as an API

In the wide public Europeana is primarily perceived as a portal exposing a great amount of cultural heritage information. Even though this perception is not entirely misleading, the main goal of Europeana rather is to build an open services platform enabling users and cultural institutions to access and manage a large collection of surrogate objects representing digital and digitised content via an Application Program Interface (API). The paper covers some details of the overall data space schema, of the API description and of the Europeana Portal implementation; it also discusses use cases and the mental approach that users, in particular cultural institutions, should adopt to completely exploit the potential of the Europeana services platform together with a discussion of related risks.