An online challenge to Google library

The European Union has announced the launch of its Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage that aims to draw together millions of books and other items.

According to the media reports, the project would use the latest technologies to allow users anywhere access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents as well as books kept in European libraries.

The source mentioned that the prototype that was launched today and would contain around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain, as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright.

Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.

Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet – it is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organizations and IT experts from throughout Europe.

By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, though this is very negligible compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries.

Around one percent of the books in the EU's national libraries are now available in digital form, with that figure expected to grow to four percent in 2012.

And even when they are digitalized, they still have to be put online. Google, one of the pioneers in this domain, claims to have seven million books available for its 'Google Book Search' project, which had gone online in 2004.