A high level group on digital libraries recently met European Commission officials in Brussels to discuss the progress on launching the European digital library. A European digital library foundation was lately created to formalise the agreement of European archives, museums, audiovisual archives and libraries to collaborate and to provide a common access point to the Continent's cultural heritage online.
A prototype of the digital library will be launched by Europe's cultural institutions in November 2008. The library will give direct access to nearly 2 million digital books, archival records, photographs, maps and film material from the region's libraries, archives and museums.
Two key issues, the financing of digitisation and solutions for making copyrighted works searchable through the European digital library, will need to be tackled for the steady growth of the project. In its meeting, the group discussed new ways for funding digitisation through public-private partnerships; solutions for mass-digitisation of out-of-print works and orphan works; and the issue of access to and preservation of scientific information.
Scientific publishers, libraries and scientists confirmed their intention to work together in an experiment with open access to scientific publications after an embargo period.
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