Europeana: EU Creating Backup Of European Civilization

FILED UNDER: Technology

The European Union is in the process of creating an immense digital backup of European civilization in the form of an online encyclopedia called Europeana. The project aims to digitize the continent’s national libraries, museums and archives and will include books, photos, maps, paintings and films – all accessible worldwide without subscription.

Europeana aims to be a single access point to all of Europe’s cultural heritage, as well as current scientific information. Strangely, the portal will only be available in three languages; English, French and German, making access difficult for many of the cultures it seeks to encompass.

The project, otherwise known as the i2010: Digital Libraries Initiative, is a rival to Google’s Library Project which began its book-scanning operation back in 2004. Google have a big head start with already 10 million scanned titles under their belt. This initiative will have to use some impressive scanning technology and a lot of man hours if they’re to catch up.

The portal is live with a demonstration tour and come November 20, will have two million objects available for public viewing. The project aims to grow that number to 10 million objects by 2010.

Sources:
Spiegel Online and i2010: Digital Libraries Initiative and Europeana
Via: The Inquirer

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Comments (One Response):

I would like to correct one important thing:
The interface will be multilingual following the launch of Europeana.

regards,
fleur stigter

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