The European Commission today announced its commitment to open a European digital library, to be called Europeana, in November. The library will make digital versions of books, music, paintings, photographs and films from cultural institutions all over Europe available free of charge. The Commission called on member states and other European countries participating in the project to bring their valuable cultural content online.
The Commission will provide a total of €119 million in 2009-2010 for improving online access to Europe's cultural heritage, with €69 million coming from the EU's research programme and the other € 50 million from Europe's competitiveness and innovation programme. As these sums are not sufficient to fully realise the digital library, the Commission is urging national institutions to invest substantially in digitisation. Today, Europe's libraries alone contain more than 2.5 billion books and only 1% of them are currently available in digital form. The estimated cost of digitising a further five million books is some € 225 million.
Two other issues that might make the realisation of Europeana difficult is the need for common standards to make databases compatible and the issue of copyrights. All published work has to be free of copyrights or provided with the consent of the right-holders. This could result in small fees to gain access to recently published books. The project is one of several current initiatives to make cultural items available online.
