EU Unveils Online Library To Compete with Google Books

The EU launched its Europeana digital library last month,an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage that aims to draw together millions of book and other terms.
Inspired by ancient Alexandria's attempt to collect the world's knowledge,the project will use the latest technologies to allow users anywhere access to films,paintings,photographs,sound recordings,maps,manuscripts,newspapers and documents as well as books kept in European libraries.From its opening,users will be able to find major literary works like Dante's Divine Comedy,or masterpieces such as Vermeer's of composers including Beethoven.
With 14 staff members and at an annual cost put at around 2.5 million euros (3.15 dollars million),Europeana which can be found at www.europeana.eu is set for humble beginnings.Soon after its launch the Website froze,its servers overwhelmed by the volume of 10 million hits an hour.The prototype contains around two million digital items,all of them already in public domain,as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright and their use online.By 2010,the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational,the aim is to have 10 million works available,an impressive number yet a mere drop in the ocean compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries.
The process of digitalisation is massive undertaking.Around 1 percent of the books in the EU's national libraries are now available in digital form,with that figure expected to grow to 4 percent in 2012.And even when they are digitalised,they still have to be put online.The size of task proved daunting even for internet giant Microsoft.The US computer firm launched its own online library project at the end of 2006,but abandoned it 18 months later after having digitalized some 750000 works.Google,one of the pioneers in this domain on the other hand,claims to have 7 million books available for its "Google Book Search"project,which began in earnest at the end of 2004.Indeed Europeana was first seen as the 27-nation bloc's response to Google.Based on a proposal from France,several nations came together in 2005 call for the creation of such a library at the EU level.