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Thursday, November 18, 2010

More than 14 million items of European cultural heritage is accessible online through the Digital Library of Europe

Europeana, the digital library of Europe, allows online access to over 14 million books, maps, photographs, paintings, films and music videos digitized from cultural institutions all over Europe. It goes beyond the initial purpose to establish in 2010 10 million online works. A study committee, the "Comité des sages", composed by Maurice Levy, Elisabeth Niggemann and Jacques de Decker, had been established by the Commission to consider new ways to upload the cultural heritage of Europe. On November 18, the committee is addressing the Council of Ministers of Culture of the European Union and the Committee on Culture of the European Parliament. A report is expected in early 2011.Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda said that Europeana was a great example of how cooperation at European level could enrich lives of everyone. 14 million objects available online is good news for all internet users who want to have access to cultural material from Europe's libraries, museums and archives. But Europeana could be even better if more cultural institutions digitised their collections and made them accessible through this European portal. Neelie Kroes trusts the Comité des Sages would soon give ambitious recommendations to speed up that process.

Europeana was launched as a prototype in November 2008 as Europe's gateway to allow internet users to search and get direct access to digitised books, maps, paintings, newspapers, photographs, film fragments and all sorts of audiovisual documents from Europe's cultural institutions. More than 14 million of these items, along with music clips, are now accessible through www.Europeana.eu, well above the Commission's initial target of 10 million works for 2010.

New items added this year include a Bulgarian parchment manuscript from 1221 witnessing to history of the Bulgarian language; ‘Catechismusa prasty szadei’, the first Lithuanian book, published in 1547; a 1588 copy of Aristotle's' «Techne retorikes» in ancient Greek and Latin; paintings by the 17th century Dutch painter Jan Steen; the complete works of German authors Goethe and Schiller; 1907 footage of festivities for the Danish Constitution Day; and a series of pre-World War I photographs of the Glendalough monastery in Ireland (see MEMO/10/586) for more examples).

Digitised photographs, maps, paintings, museum objects and other images make up 64% of the Europeana collection. 34% of the collection is dedicated to digitised texts, including more than 1.2 million complete books that can be viewed online and/or downloaded. The texts cover thousands of rare manuscripts and the earliest printed books (incunabula) from before 1500. Video and sound material represents less than 2% of the collections. Much of the material accessible through Europeana is older, i.e. out of copyright, items, due mainly to the difficulties and cost of rights clearance to digitise and give access to in-copyright material (even for material that is no longer commercially distributed or out-of-print) or material whose potential right-holders are unknown (orphan works).

All EU Member States have contributed items to Europeana, but input is still uneven. France is still the largest contributor (18% of total items). Germany has increased its share to 17%. To ensure Europeana represents a true cross-section of Europe's cultural heritage, it needs further quality material from all Member States.

The potential for using Europeana in schools was demonstrated by entrants in the recent eLearning Awards organised by European Schoolnet. The winning project, from Portmarnock Community School in Ireland involved pupils creating their own blogs about figures from history using digital resources.

Next year Europeana intends to experiment with user-generated content and will invite users to contribute material to Europeana around the theme of World War I.

Currently, Europeana has two virtual exhibitions running. 'Reading Europe' presents a rich choice from Europe's rare books and literary works. The 'art nouveau' exhibition shows the potential of bringing together cultural material from different countries.

Background

Europeana is a collaborative endeavour of Europe's cultural institutions. Over 1500 cultural institutions from across Europe are contributing digitised material. It was launched as a prototype, in November 2008 and initially it had 2 million cultural objects available online (IP/08/1747).

The Europeana office is hosted by the National Library of the Netherlands in Den Haag. It is run by the Europeana Foundation and is 80% financed by the EU. At its launch in 2008 it was overwhelmed by the unexpected user interest and had to close for a month.

Source  Europeana website

More information  Press room - European Commission

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