EU opens digital library: will provide access to millions of books online

Brussels - The European Union is opening its own European digital library. The ambition of the project named Europeana, which will be officially launched on Thursday, is to have over ten million items in digital form within about two years, whether books, images, films, or various significant archival materials.
    Europeana will not only contain books. It will also include digital versions of images, musical works, films, or radio materials.
    Among the first "items" are, for example, Dante's Divine Comedy, compositions and manuscripts of musical geniuses like Mozart or Beethoven, radio recordings from World War I, as well as a collection of more than 500 paintings by Pablo Picasso, Portuguese maps from the age of exploration, and a collection of 500 dialects and languages recorded across Britain.
    The Czechs will be represented by a digital version of the Vyšehrad Codex. This is an ancient manuscript ordered by the Benedictines of Břevnov in Regensburg, Germany, on the occasion of the coronation of Vratislav II in 1085.
    The operation of the library, which will initially be run by about 14 employees, will cost around 2.5 million euros (64.4 million crowns) per year. It will be officially available from Thursday at www.europeana.eu. Access to the materials will be free.
    Initially, it will contain around two million objects in digital form. By 2010, when it is expected to be fully functional, it should offer at least ten million items. In comparison, traditional European libraries hold around 2.5 billion books, so this will only be a symbolic drop in the ocean for now.
    European Commissioner for Information Technology Viviane Reding, however, emphasized in August during the presentation of the project the advantages that the project and the possibilities of using the latest technologies will bring.
    "For example, a Czech student will be able to view works from the British Library without having to travel to London. An Irish art lover will be able to admire the Mona Lisa without having to stand in line at the Louvre," she stated at that time.
    Only one percent of the mentioned 2.5 billion books is available in digital form. By 2012, this could increase to around four percent.
    Problems with digitization include copyright issues with new works and the conversion to digital format itself.
    American company Microsoft could add to this, as noted by AFP agency. The software and computing giant launched its own library project in 2006, but after 18 months and having converted 750,000 works into digital form, it withdrew from it.
    In contrast, the world's largest internet search engine, Google, launched its own program - Google Book Search - at the end of 2004, which reportedly links to up to seven million digitized works. In addition to the library, Brussels is also investing around 120 million euros (three billion crowns) in the development of digitization technologies over the next two years.