The official launch of Europeana, the European digital library, will take place on 20th November 2008 in Brussels.
Europeana will be Europe’s single and multilingual online portal (www.europeana.eu) opening the doors to books stored by national libraries all over Europe and a rich variety of other digital works from cultural institutions including, paintings, music, maps, manuscripts, newspapers or even ancient vessels which have been digitised – all of this accessible just at the click of a mouse.
The creation of Europeana has been the key goal of the Digital Libraries Initiative adopted by the European Commission in 2005 to make Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage open to all.
In August 2008, the Commission asked Member States to step up their efforts to contribute more to the European digital library and enrich its holdings by allocating more funding to digitisation, by working harder to preserve digital material or by solving outstanding copyright issues.
For the period 2009-2010 around € 69 million will be available for research on digital libraries through the EU’s research programme. In the same period the Information Society part of the Competitiveness and innovation programme will allocate around € 50 million to improve access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.
