News
Europeana launches
21.11.08 | Katie Coyne
A European digital cultural database launched yesterday (20th November) could help save orphan books from oblivion, according to a European Commission spokesperson.
Orphan books are copyrighted but those owning the copyright are not known, making it impossible to get permission to reprint them. The concern is that orphan books could deteriorate before their copyright runs out, and their contents have been saved for future generations.
But the launch of the European multimedia library, Europeana, should speed up efforts to find a solution to this problem. The European Commission aims to swell the number of items contained in the database – spanning a huge cultural range and not just books - to 10 million by 2010.
Martin Selmayr, European Commission spokesperson for information society and media, argued that in order for this target to be reached, at least some orphan books would need to be included. He said: “Forty per cent of the British Library is orphan -it’s not just a small phenomenon. There is a twentieth century cultural black hole as there is a huge amount copyrighted and orphan books. The question is what can one do about these out of print works? We may lose them from the cultural heritage.”
Europeana contains digitised books, audio and film material, photos, paintings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archival documents from across Europe.
The library will be run by a 14 strong team and will cost €2.m annually to run. Eventually it will be searchable in all European Union languages but at the moment it is only searchable in the language that the item was uploaded in.
Currently, France has the highest number of cultural items loaded on the site comprising 52%. The UK and Netherlands hold the joint second highest number of cultural pieces on the website at 10% each. Finland has the third highest number of objects comprising 8% of the site.
To visit the database go to www.europeana.eu.
