The European Commission has warned of a ‘20th century black hole’ in its online Digital Libraries programme aimed at making the content of Europe’s vast library, museum and archive collections available on the web.
The Digital Libraries initiative, dubbed ‘Europeana’, was launched in 2005 and is due to be opened as a web portal in November 2008 (http://fastlink.headstar.com/dl2).
Originally the project aimed to have 6 million ‘digital objects’ online by 2010 but according to the report this target is set to be comfortably exceeded. According to a commission statement, “in ancient times, the library of Alexandria was said to contain between 30 and 70% of the world’s existing knowledge. Our challenge is to do better than that in the digital age and to make the result last longer.”
However the new progress report highlights the difficulty member states face in digitising copyrighted material, resulting in a ‘black hole’ where cultural material from the last century are conspicuously absent from the archives (see http://fastlink.headstar.com/dl1).
Meanwhile the commission’s Joint Research Centre has announced a pilot project which will enable researchers throughout Europe to access the results of EU funded research via the internet. The EU’s 7th Research Framework Programme has provided more than 50 billion Euros to researchers across the EU and the new project will help disseminate the fruits of this funding: http://fastlink.headstar.com/jrc1.
