A European Online Cultural Library?

Very quietly, earlier this year the European Commission launched Europeana, a demonstration site of European cultural items. It’s a showcase to encourage organizations to donate digital content. By the end of this year it could be the great online repository of European culture, containing artworks, films, books and music, the catalogues of some of the world’s great museums and galleries, ZDNET reports – or it will be if it gets the money.

The EC has already earmarked over $180 of its own funds for the project for 2009-2010, but it needs more, and wants public and private investment in order to speed up the pace of digitization – currently only 1% of the contents of European libraries are digitized.

The Commission is also worried about standards, noting that:

"Common standards need to be implemented to make different information sources and databases compatible for and usable by the European Digital Library."