Europeana kicks off

On 2 and 3 April EUROPEANA organised a kick-off meeting at the Dutch National Library in The Hague. All of the project’s six work packages were work shopped by some 100 representatives of EUROPEANA’S partners and projects relevant to the realising of the project, including ARROW. Partners are typically national libraries, archives, museums, audio-visual collections and others that offer similar services to the ones offered by such institutions. These partners will also contribute content to be made accessible via EUROPEANA. Of the at least 100 partners it aims at recruiting during the project period 62 have already signed up.

When it was launched on 20 November last year EUROPEANA was introduced as “Europe’s online library, museum and archive”. Its main business case is to provide online access to individual and institutional users across Europe to intellectual and other works both in and out of copyright. As such it will run services for the European Digital Library (EDL) Foundation which was set up in 2007 with the purpose of providing cross-border and cross domain access to Europe’s cultural heritage.

EUROPEANA does not purport to become a content owner. Rather it aims to develop into a “super-aggregator” offering a platform to users for access to content. Content will be offered through various channels such as via school networks, university portals, sites for visually impaired, library portals, etc. The objective is to reach 10 mill. objects by 2010 and 25 mill. by 2014 and to include works both in and out of print. Already four months after the launch users can access more than 4.5 mill. books, maps, recordings, photographs, films, etc. across the EU Member States and EEA countries. Most of these are, however, works which are out of copyright.

The European Commission envisages granting EUR 25 mill. towards various projects including digitisation and open access to scientific content and the use of the cultural heritage for educational purposes. Member States will also contribute financially. ARROW is a project consortium made up of national libraries, publishers, creators and collective management organisations in text and image based works (RROs) set up to support the European digital libraries project through facilitating interoperability in relation to identifying rights status and clearance of copyright works.

ARROW Plus is a Best Practice Network selected under the Competitiveness and innovation framework programme