France Launches Digital Library
Europeana, the new cyber library, will offer over 6 million books,
movies, and documents from across Europe, to strengthen cultural
diversity
by Helena Spongenberg
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070330_226098.htm…
The French national library BNF has launched a prototype version of
its contribution to a European digital library aimed to be one of the
European alternatives to US digitalisation of books and documents.
Europeana – as the cyber library is named – currently offers access to
some 12,000 public domain full-text documents but is set to have by
2010 over 6 million books, movies, photographs and other documents
from across the European Union countries.
The creation of Europeana is "for France and Europe an important
challenge and a great ambition to the service of spreading knowledge,
cultural diversity, keeping the value of languages and the information
that is the base of our shared identity," French president Jacques
Chirac said according to Spanish daily El Pais.
"We want to make it so that Europe is not entirely abandoned to an
American search engine," said Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the head of BNF,
according to French press reports.
US Internet search giant Google triggered an international race to
build an online library when it announced plans in December 2004 to
digitise books and documents from a handful of big libraries.
US Internet and software giants Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon soon
announced separate plans while France, angry that private companies
took the lead, instead pushed for the creation of a public digital
library.
Europeana so far also has the support of 23 public libraries in
Hungary, Italy, Germany, Poland and Spain.
Another European library project is also under way and is already
receiving co-funding from the European Commission.
The library is to be based on the infrastructure of an already
existing European network that allows access to digital resources held
in national libraries.
It also aims to display around 6 million books, photographs and films
available to all internet users by 2010.
The main difference between the two online libraries is the language
of the website itself. Europeana is in French while the European
Library is in English.
The Conference of European National Librarians welcomed the move
saying the BNF has "created an example of what the future European
Digital Library might be," it said in a statement.
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