A project has begun to bring the European heritage online through a single portal.
Seventy senior managers and technical experts from museums, archives, audio-visual collections and libraries across Europe came together to plan the European Digital Library. The meeting took place at the National Library of the Netherlands.
The initiative stems from the call by Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media to ‘make the wealth of material in Europe’s libraries, museums and archives accessible to all’.
This reflects growing user interest in major digitisation projects that are creating large-scale online heritage resources. However, this is the first initiative to focus on providing a multilingual interface to digital artefacts, texts and media from across the European heritage.
Such collaboration between the archival, library, audio-visual and museum domains on this scale is a significant new move....
The project – the European Digital Library network (EDLnet) – runs for two years, and will develop a prototype that demonstrates proof of concept, bringing together content from some of Europe’s major cultural organisations. The project will be run by The European Library together with the National Library of the Netherlands.
The project will look at the political, human, technical and semantic issues that will contribute to the creation of an interoperable system able to access fully digitised content. It will invite feedback from different types of users in order to create a service that enriches the widest public and answers the needs of researchers, students, teachers and the creative industries.
EDLnet is an initiative developed following the European Commission’s recommendation on 24 August 2006 on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material. It is a Thematic Network funded under the eContentplus programme as part of the i2010 policy
EDLnet builds on the success of The European Library, a portal that enables people to search across 150 million titles, from 172 collections in 31 European national libraries. The European Library is a service of the Conference of European National Librarians....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/02/2007 01:10:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
