Culture for Unity

A parchment dating back to 1221 testifies to the history of Bulgarian language; “Catechismusa prasty szadei”, the first book in Lithuanian, published in 1547; 17th century paintings by Dutch painter Jan Steen; all the works of the German authors Goethe and Schiller. These are only some of the many European cultural resources that can be explored by logging on the website of Europeana, the EU’s digital library (www.europeana.eu).To enrich the life of all citizens. Europeana is a EU initiative aimed at stepping up Europe’s cultural heritage and integration. Anyone in the world can now access over 14 million digitised books, maps, photographs, paintings, film and music clips from 1500 cultural institutions across Europe. Launched in November 2008 with two million objects, it was overwhelmed by the unexpected user interest and had to close for a month. Europeana has already passed the initial target for 2010 of 10 million objects and now after only two years new horizons lie ahead this third-millennium digital library. A “Reflection Group” at work. A reflection Group (“Comité des Sages” composed by Maurice Lévy, Elisabeth Niggemann, Jacques de Decker ) is exploring new ways to bring Europe’s cultural heritage online, identifying its limits and potentials. A report will be issued in the beginning of 2011. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda is closely following this “cultural endeavour”: “Europeana is a great example of how cooperation at European level can enrich all of our lives. 14 million objects available online is good news for all internet users who want to have access to cultural material from Europe’s libraries, museums and archives”.Books, incunabula and video material. Among the digitised resources that have been made available this year figure 1907 footage of festivities for the Danish Constitution Day; and a series of pre-World War I photographs of the Glendalough monastery in Ireland. “Digitised photographs, maps, paintings, museum objects and other images make up 64% of the Europeana collection”, states the EU Commission in its presentation. “34% of the collection is dedicated to digitised texts, including more than 1.2 million complete books that can be viewed online and/or downloaded.” The texts cover thousands of rare manuscripts and the earliest printed books (incunabula) from before 1500. Video and sound material represents less than 2% of the collections. Much of the material accessible through Europeana is older, i.e. out of copyright, items. Further quality material is needed. All EU Member States have contributed items to Europeana, “but input is still uneven”, declared the Commission. France is still the largest contributor (18% of total items). Germany has increased its share to 17%. “To ensure Europeana represents a true cross-section of Europe’s cultural heritage, it needs further quality material from all Member States”. The Europeana office is hosted by the National Library of the Netherlands in Den Haag. It is run by the Europeana Foundation and is 80% financed by the EU. Currently, Europeana has two virtual exhibitions running. ‘Reading Europe’ “presents a rich choice from Europe’s rare books and literary works”; The ‘art nouveau’ exhibition shows the potential of bringing together cultural material from different countries”.Contents created by internet users. Commissioner Kroes said: “Europeana could be even better if more cultural institutions digitised their collections and made them accessible through this European portal. I trust the Comité des Sages will soon give us ambitious recommendations to speed up that process”. The Commissioner underlined, “The potential for using Europeana in schools was demonstrated by entrants in the recent eLearning Awards organised by European Schoolnet”. The winning project, from Portmarnock Community School in Ireland, “involved pupils creating their own blogs about figures from history using digital resources”. Next year Europeana intends to experiment with user-generated content and will invite users to contribute material to Europeana around the theme of World War I”.