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The European Digital Library (EDL) will go online in November at europeana.eu. According to French daily Le Figaro two million works would be offered initially for digital browsing, rising to six million by 2010.
The EC is allocating €120m to "improve the online accessibility to the European cultural heritage," information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding was reported as saying. But despite "considerable progress" by European Union (EU) member states, she urged greater efforts. "Extra public and private investments are necessary to accelerate digitisation," she said. The cost of digitising five million works from European libraries totals some €225m, excluding manuscripts, paintings and other pictures.
Some European Union (EU) countries are trying harder than others, according to the report. Reding gave brownie points to Slovenia, which has created a public-private partnership, and Slovakia, which has converted an old military complex into a mass digitisation centre with automatic page-turners.
But the four-year-old Google Library Project remains way ahead in the digitisation race. The company has signed up "numerous European partners" over the past year, including Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ghent University, the Lyon Municipal Library, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Lausanne. It has also made a first step in Asia with Keio University in Japan.