Europe’s online library is taking shape

Europeana, Europe’s online repository of digitised cultural heritage, is nearing its first anniversary. Starting with a collection of around two million works, it increased the number of works on offering to five million within a year. “We plan to double our collection every year, and we certainly will reach that target,” says Jon Purday, Europeana’s marketing manager. France is the biggest contributor to Europeana. Almost half of Europeana’s collection originates there. The other 26 member states make up for the remaining half.

Viviane Reding, Commissioner for the Information Society, is critical of Europeana’s progress and has complained about the slow rate at which books, video’s and paintings are made available digitally. “Member states should stop envying progress on other continents and do their homework properly,” Reading said recently, referring to Google Books. Reading has pleaded for cooperation between Google and Europeana where documents in the public domain, works of which copyright has expired, are concerned.

There are two reasons why the digital repository is not growing as fast as it potentially could. First of all, works uploaded to Europeana are all works that are free of copyright. 90 Per cent of the contents of libraries in Europe is still copyrighted. Rights holders need to give their consent to every book that Europeana wants to add to the collection, as making a work digital means creating a copy. That is hardly a workable situation when one aims to digitise the entire European cultural heritage. Every European country has its own copyright system. And licences for books are provided per country. So a single book may be published by tens of publishers across the EU, each of which has to consent to uploading it to Europeana.

The second problem in expanding Europeana’s collection is collecting material. Europeana’s staff of twenty lacks the capacity to actively scour the lands for publishable works themselves. Instead, they rely on what libraries in member states make available.

Some libraries, especially in less affluent member states, are reluctant to send in works to Europeana. Hungary’s National Library, for example, participates in the e-Books-on Demand scheme. In that programme, libraries digitise works that are free of copyright on demand and makes them available as a paid-for service. When they would send in their works to Europeana for free, this well would run dry. Hungary has only made available 4600 works of the estimated seven million works in its collection.