Sally Chambers, Interoperability Manager, The European Library The European Library and Europeana: an overview

Vision Provision of equal access to promote world-wide understanding of the richness and diversity of European learning and culture. Mission The European Library exists to open up the universe of knowledge, information and culture of all Europe's national libraries.

 2005: Finland, France, Germany, Italy-Florence, Italy-Rome, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, UK  2006: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia  2007: Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Russia-Moscow, Spain, Sweden  2008: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Russia-St. Petersburg, Turkey, Ukraine  2009+: Montenegro, San Marino, Vatican City

Service of all 48 European National libraries to provide access to their catalogues & digital collections via one central, multi-lingual web-interface (“the portal”)  Alternate point of access  Exposure to a wider audience  Platform for collaboration  Single point of access  Search multiple libraries and collections  Multi-lingual interface

‘A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the European cultural heritage.’ European Parliament, 27 September 2007 ‘A unique resource for Europe's distributed cultural heritage… ensuring a common access to Europe's libraries, archives and museums.’ Horst Forster, Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems Information Society Directorate, European Commission Europeana: the vision

Europeana: the timetable Currently bringing in digitised content from Europe’s cultural collections Public prototype launching in November 2008 Over 2 million digitised objects Content that represents all 4 domains Pan-European coverage Multilingual interface Access to over 6 million objects by 2010 Europeana: the timetable

Funded by the Commission’s digital libraries initiative under the eContentplus call 2-year thematic partnership network 100 partners representing: all EU Member States related Commission-funded projects the 4 cultural heritage domains: audio-visual collections archives museums libraries The Europeana network