Photo: © European Union, 2009
France and Germany announced digitization projects
Both German and French governments announced recently their own digitization projects in response to Google.
According to president, Nicolas Sarkozy, France is to embark on a mass book digitisation project financed by a national loan. It would prevent what he described as a "friendly" large American company taking away its digital heritage.
The German initiative, called German Digital Library (DDB) would go on line in 2011. The Culture Minister Bernd Neumann has empathized that they would first seek copyright holders' approval before digitizing a work.
Both these initiatives would presumably feed into Europeana, for which the ARROW project (supported by IFRRO) is designing the system for identifying rights, rightholders and rights status in a work and for dealing with orphan works.
