Eastern librairies come to Brussels

Europeana, the European Digital Library, is the aggregator of European cultural content. Interoperability is at the heart of what Europeana is doing: integrating format types across borders, across domains and between institutions. Museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual (AV) collections have different histories, user-groups and purposes. These are reflected in their diverse approaches to cataloguing and the development of varying standards. The result is that delivering all content types in the same online space requires a commitment to working collaboratively and sharing knowledge across long-established professional boundaries.
There is a complimentary partnership between Europeana and The European Library. The European Library which is a service of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), a foundation aiming to increase the role of national libraries in Europe, currently represents over 380 collections from National Libraries throughout Europe. The European Library intends to maximize the exposure of the richness of these collections, with a special focus on digital content and objects. In other words, The European Library and its partners are designing a common ground that will promote content across borders by fully engaging the user through its different services; multilingual interface, fully-searchable collections of national libraries, more content accessible via the provision of high-quality full-text, promotion of OAI-PMH compliance or promotion of its shared exhibition space. Ultimately, The European Library aims at becoming the libraries aggregator for Europeana.
BHL-Europe – a portal for biodiversity literature The libraries of the European natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold the majority of the world’s published knowledge on biological diversity. Today, this wealth of knowledge is not yet disclosed to the rest of the world while direct access and distribution is limited. The BHL-Europe (Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe) project develops a multilingual portal, which will provide unprecedented access to more than 25 million pages of biodiversity literature. The unique collections include information on animals, plants, artworks and rare works by important scientist such as Charles Darwin or Alexander von Humboldt.
BHL-Europe and Europeana
The biodiversity community Portal will be linked to Europeana, the cultural website governed by the EDL Foundation. Europeana offers search capabilities through millions of digital items provided by Europe’s museums and galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual organisations. Some of these are world famous, others are as yet hidden treasures. Europeana will deliver access to over 10 million digital objects by 2010.
BHL-Europe adds substantial added value to Europeana and it’s users by making available a great amount of biodiversity literature and thus delivering the first major corpus of science material to Europeana.
BHL-Europe and the EDL Foundation
The Europeana Digital Library Foundation had been set up to develop a sustainable and secure future for Europeana. BHL-Europe will cooperate closely with EDL Foundation, by adopting best practices and standards and to ensure full interoperability.
BHL-Europe will support European institutions in their national bids for funding for digitization of biodiversity material. In addition the project aims to attract new content providers. It will coordinate with Europeana, BHL global and national scanning projects to ensure material scanned by BHL-Europe is available through these portals. EuropeanaLocal - Making local and regional content available through Europeana
EuropeanaLocal aims to make digital content from regional and local museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual institutions interoperable and accessible through Europeana and other service providers. EuropeanaLocal will ensure that the approaches, standards and tools developed by Europeana are adopted widely across the cultural heritage sector, thereby supporting the interoperability of content within Europeana beyond that which is held by purely national level institutions.
EuropeanaLocal, which runs from 1 June 2008 until May 2011, is funded under the European Commission’s eContentPlus Programme and co-ordinated by MDR Partners from the UK. The project consortium consists of 32 partners from 27 countries across Europe. There will be no portal by the end of the project; all material will be made accessible through the main Europeana interface.
The Europeana service offers access to millions of digital items provided by Europe’s museums, galleries, archives, libraries and audio-visual organisations. Some of these are world famous, others are as yet hidden treasures. Europeana will deliver access to over 10 million digital objects by 2010.