The European Commission (EC), in a policy document, has declared as its target to bring the number of digitised objects in Europe's multilingual digital library, Europeana, to 10 million by 2010. The EC has also opened a public debate on the future challenges for book digitisation in Europe. The challenges include the potential of the public and private sector to team up and the need to reform Europe's too fragmented copyright framework.
Presently, a user can find 4.6 million digitised objects on Europeana, compared to 2 million nine months ago. However, the substantial progress made with Europeana also brings to the surface the challenges and problems linked to the digitisation process. At the moment, Europeana includes mainly digitised books which are in the public domain and are thus no longer protected by copyright law (which extends to 70 years after the death of the author). It includes, for legal reasons, neither out-of print works (some 90% of the books in Europe's national libraries), nor orphan works (estimated at 10–20% of in-copyright collections) which are still in copyright but where the author cannot be identified.
Europeana also shows that licensing of copyright-protected material in Europe still takes place under a very fragmented legal framework. Earlier this year, a French aggregator had to withdraw photographs from Europeana, since it only had the right to disseminate the material on French territory.
To address all these issues, the EC has launched a public consultation on the future of Europeana and the digitisation of books that will run until November 15, 2009. Questions the EC asks include: How can it be ensured that digitised material can be made available to consumers EU-wide?; Should there be better cooperation with publishers with regard to in-copyright material?; Would it be a good idea to create European registries for orphan and out-of print works?; and How should Europeana be financed in the long term?
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