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

 

 

These 4 organisations form the bedrock of the Europeana Libraries project.

  • Europeana Foundation
  • CENL
  • CERL
  • LIBER

CENL supports Open Data licensing

Meeting at the Royal Library of Denmark, the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), has voted overwhelmingly to support the open licensing of their data.

This means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe will become increasingly accessible for anybody to re-use. It also implies that vast quantities of trustworthy data are available for Linked Open Data developments, creating relationships between elements of information that’s never been possible before.

The first outcome of the open licence agreement is that the metadata provided by national libraries to Europeana.eu via the CENL’s service The European Library, will have a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication, or CC0 licence. This metadata relates to millions of digitised texts and images coming from initiatives that include Google’s mass digitisations of books in the national libraries of the Netherlands and Austria.

Access the full press-release in English - PDF format

Access the full press-release in Serbian - PDF format

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: