Developing Europeana, the European digital library, with both public domain works and works protected by copyright is the goal reiterated by the EU’s culture ministers in conclusions adopted on 10 May in Brussels. The aim is to put ten million works online by the end of the year.

With numerous logistics, legal and financial challenges, building Europeana ( www.europeana.eu) is no easy task. According to their conclusions, the member states are determined to move beyond the six million or so books, maps, photographs, film extracts, paintings and musical extracts already online.

Europeana was launched at the end of 2008, particularly with the aim of avoiding a monopoly by certain internet giants like Google, which is digitising millions of books for its internet library, Google Books. To start, the European portal is being built up with works in the public domain provided by national libraries and museums. “It is necessary to increase the number of objects, both public domain works and works covered by intellectual property rights […] in full respect of intellectual property rights,” state the ministers. This implies solving “issues related to intellectual property rights,” including for out-of-print and out-of-distribution works or those whose rights holders cannot be located (orphan works), and to raise “additional funding for digitisation, which could involve public-private partnerships,” state the ministers.

These two questions have been put to a committee of experts just set up by the European Commission, whose members are Maurice Lévy, CEO of the French advertising group Publicis, Elisabeth Niggemann, chair of the German National Library, and Jacques De Decker, Belgian writer and journalist. Although the European portal has grown from two to more than six million works, “this is just a small part of all the works held by European cultural institutions,” regretted Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes upon announcing the creation of the committee in late April. “The lack of means and the rigidity of laws cannot be an excuse,” she added. Kroes and her colleague, Androulla Vassiliou (education), expect to have the experts’ report and conclusions by the end of the year.

According to the Council, it is also essential to ensure the cultural, geographical and linguistic diversity of works and to improve the site’s multilingual functions while continuing to study the needs and profiles of users and to make the site better known. Wherever possible, the EU uses open formats for its site “in order to allow the involvement of the largest possible community of [software] developers”.

The Commission will have to present proposals for the development and funding of Europeana beyond 2013. For now, around €2 million from EU funds are spent annually on the library.