Europeana: Towards The European Digital Library

This paper briefly describes the process that will lead to Europeana, the European Digital Library. This process is currently running, so that it is possible to give only an account of its inception, involved actors and projects, and current status. The paper concludes by quickly outlining the role that CNR has in the making of Europeana. 1 Europeana: the inception In October 2004 Google launched Book Search a tool that searches the full text of books. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In reaction to that, in 2005 Jacques Chirac called for a European Digital Library in order to affirm the „cultural identity‟ of Europe and to spread its heritage. In 2006, The European Commission takes on board the duty of creating the European Information space (i2010) and in particular elaborates a plan to bring on-line the European Culture on 24 August 2006, the European Commission presented its vision about the European Digital Library: A common multilingual access point would make it possible to search Europe’s distributed – that is to say, held in different places by different organisations – digital cultural heritage online. Such an access point would increase its visibility and underline common features. The access point should build on existing initiatives such as The European Library (TEL), in which Europe’s libraries already cooperate. It should where possible closely associate private holders of rights in cultural material and all interested stakeholders. A strong commitment by the Member states and cultural institutions to arrive at such an access point should be encouraged [2]. 2 Building Europeana: actors Several actors are involved in building the Europeana Digital Library: stakeholders, experts in the various scientific/technological areas, system developers, business developers, and managers. Stakeholders are the institutions who provide content, such libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives, and others; they have two main goals: to provide metadata to the Europeana Digital Library about their artifacts, and to help in defining standards for interoperability. Scientific actors have as main goal to define the interoperability framework, and to specify the functionality of Europeana. System developers have the task of designing and implement the Digital Library System (DLS) [1], based on the functional specifications. Business developers have the task of ensuring the long-term sustainability of Europeana. 3 Building Europeana: the projects cluster The Europeana Digital Library will be the result of a number of projects run by different cultural heritage institutions; amongst these projects, we have:  Athena, an aggregator that helps museums bringing their content to Europeana.  APENet, a Best Practice Network whose objective is to build an Internet Gateway for Documents and Archives in Europe.  EuropeanaLocal, aiming at improving the interoperability of the digital content held by regional and local institutions.  European Film Gateway, whose goal is to find solutions for providing integrated access to the Europe’s cinematographic heritage.  Judeica, whose aim is to establish a comprehensive map of European Jewish Cultural Heritage.  EuropeanaConnect, that will provide the technologies and resources to semantically enrich the digital content in Europeana.  Europeana V1.0 that will implement the technological platform. All projects are part-funded by the European Commission‟s eContentplus program. The full implementation of the Europeana Digital Library System is the goal of the two “core” projects: EuropeanaConnect and Europeana V1.0. The complete list of the projects contributing to Europeana is at the URL: . 4 Building Europeana: the EDLNet The EDLnet Thematic Network is an eContentPlus program recently concluded, that has prepared the ground for the European Digital Library. The project main topic was to improve the cross-domain accessibility to cultural content, a pillar of the European Commission‟s i2010 Digital Libraries initiative. EDLnet Thematic Network has brought on board the key European stakeholders to build consensus on creating the European Digital Library. EDLnet project main results are:  The creation of a large visible community of archivists, librarians and museum people committed to making content available in an interoperable way.  The production of clear and usable summary reports and recommendations on each of the main areas of interoperability addressed in the EDLnet.  The definition of a roadmap showing how the component parts interlink and what needs to be achieved when to realise the aim of the European Digital Library.  The implementation of a fully working prototype, with interoperable multilingual access, covering over 4,5 million digital items.  The definition of a proposal for funding to create a fully operational European Digital Library service. As of April 09 the Europeana prototype (www.europeana.eu) contains data from 54 cultural institutions from 24 countries.