The Europeana Libraries project is working to make 5 million digital objects from 19 leading European research libraries freely accessible on The European Library and Europeana websites.
Spanish civil war photographs, Ottoman manuscripts, historic medical films and thousands of theses, journals and academic articles are among the digital resources that Europeana Libraries is working with. When the Project finishes at the end of 2012, it will have created:
- A valuable resource for scholars, with full-text search capabilities for written works
- A robust network of national, university and research libraries
- An efficient aggregation model that can be used by research libraries across Europe
A Closer Look: Collection of Historical Notices
An extraordinary collection of historical notices from the 16th century is being contributed to the Europeana Libraries project from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
Between 1560-1587, the Swiss pastor Johann Jakob Wick (1522-1588) assembled a wide variety of historical notices and organized them into 24 volumes. This collection is called Wickiana. The documents are an important source for the period of the Reformation in Switzerland and contain reports about political and religious events such as catastrophes, accidents, crimes as well as poems or letters from different authors and creators.
The image shows two examples of more than 1,000 prints, drawings and broadsheets of the collection: The left page tells about the sinking of a big merchant ship near Venice in October, 1583. The right page reports on the wife of Hans Elder, who gave birth to a child with distorted feet and a circular ulcer on its back, the “Monstrosity of the Upper Rhine Valley” (title). After Wick’s death, the documents were held by the Grossmünster monastery library. In 1836 they moved to the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
Creator: Johann Jakob Wick / different authors and creators,
Title: [Main title]: Sammlung von Nachrichten zur Zeitgeschichte aus den Jahren 1560-1587 (mit älteren Stücken) / Left: Untergang eines grossen Handelsschiffes ausserhalb von Venedig im Oktober 1583 / Right: Missgeburt im Rheintal,
Year: 1583, Institution: Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Collection: Wickiana
Contact us
Europeana Libraries
c/o The European Library
National Library of the Netherlands
PO Box 90407
2509 LK The Hague
The Netherlands
Ina Heinz
The European Library
Email: ina.heinz AT kb.nl