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The European Commission (EC) is pressing member states to digitize, preserve and make available content stored in the archives of their libraries and institutions.
"The Internet is the most powerful new tool we have had for storing and sharing information since the Gutenberg press, so let's use it to make the material in Europe's libraries and archives accessible to all," said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding.
An online library combining all these resources is a massive undertaking that will require the processing and digitizing of billions of books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music. The EC has identified three key areas for action: digitization, online accessibility and digital preservation. It sees private involvement and public/private partnerships as crucial to achieving this goal, but it will also provide funding through its research programs and eContentplus initiative.
The Commission is currently seeking submissions from stakeholders, which will go towards the formation of a policy document, and it hopes to coordinate the activities of cultural institutions, such as the national and deposit libraries, on an EU level to build "critical mass" and to ensure EU-wide access to digitized collections. It says the commitment of the Member States and the individual institutions (libraries, archives) will determine how fast the project is carried out. It says the focus is not on the creation of one site or structure, but that a "user should be able to search in different collections through one single entry point and use the material."
This latest move follows on from a letter signed by 19 European national libraries and several heads of state, including Poland's National Library and President Alexsander Kwaśniewski, which called for the creation of a European digital library.
Intellectual property rights could prove a major stumbling block to the project. According to the EC: "Under current legislation only public domain works [where there is no longer copyright] can be made available to the public online. For other works, digital libraries need to get the explicit agreement of rightholders. In practice this means that only works from the 1920s or before will be covered in a digital library, or works for which there is an agreement, on a case by case basis, with the rightholders."
