Is Europeana Too Flash?

I've written before about the nascent European Digital Library:

Consistent with the i2010 digital library initiative, this thematic network will build consensus to create the European Digital Library. It will find solutions to the interoperability of the cultural content held by European museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries in the context of The European Digital Library.

Now we have a chance to try it out - at least as a demo. It's cross-linking is impressively rich, but I do worry that we're going to end up with something too flashy - or, rather, too Flashy, with lots of invisible code that makes deep linking impossible. We shall see - or maybe not....

European Digital Library - An Update

I've written about this project several times; here's the latest info:

Europe's cultural institutions plan to launch a prototype of the European digital library in November 2008. It will give direct access to at least 2 million digital books, photographs, maps, archival records, and film material from Europe's libraries, archives and museums. By 2010 this will already have rapidly grown to include far more digital objects than the 6 million originally envisaged as more institutions make their digitised assets searchable through the European digital library.

For a steady growth of the European digital library, two key issues need to be tackled: the financing of digitisation and solutions for making copyrighted works searchable through the European digital library. In its yesterday's meeting the high level group discussed:

* new ways for funding digitisation through public private partnerships;
* solutions for mass-digitisation of out of print works and orphan works (for which it is very difficult to locate the rightholders). By June next year the group should find an agreement on dealing with orphan works (including criteria for searching for rightholders);
* the issue of access to and preservation of scientific information (see IP/07/190). Scientific publishers, libraries and scientists confirmed their intention to work together in an experiment with open access to scientific publications after an embargo period.

It's particuarly pleasing to see orphan works mentioned, since bringing them online would make a huge difference. It's also good to see scientific publishers making positive noises - though we'll need to see the details. (Via paidContent:UK.)

European Digital Library, European Archive

Some time back I wrote about the European Digital Library. But it seems that this isn't enough: now we have the European Archive, too, which seems even more ambitious. For as well as providing access to digital versions of traditional content, it seems to be aiming to become a European mirror of the wonderful Internet Archive:

The European Archive is a non-profit foundation working towards universal access to all knowledge. The archive will achieve this through partnerships with libraries, museums, other collection bodies, and through building its own collections. The primary goal of collecting this knowledge is to make it as publicly accessible as possible, via the Internet and other means.

...

As the web has grown in importance as a publishing medium, we are behind in bringing into operation the archiving and library services that will provide enduring access to many important resources. Where some assumed web site owners would archive their own materials, this has not generally been the case. If properly archived, the Web history can provide a tremendous base for time-based analysis of the content, the topology including emerging communities and topics, trends analysis etc. as well as an invaluable source of information for the future.

The foremost effort to archive the Web has been carried on in the US by the Internet Archive, a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco. Every two months, large snapshots of the surface of the web are archived by the Internet Archive since 1996.

This entire collection offers 500 terabytes of data of major significance in all domain that have been impacted by the development of the Internet, that is, almost all. This represent large amount of data (petabytes in the coming years) to crawl, organize and give access to.

By partnering with the Internet Archive, the European Archive is laying down the foundation of a global Web archive based in Europe.

Obviously, all this begs scads of questions to do with access and copyright, but at least it's a start.

The European Digital Library: Glimmers of Hope

When I last wrote about the proposed European Digital Library, I was not optimistic about what users might be able to do with its content: "IP" considerations seemed to be raising their ugly head.

But maybe there's hope. A recent background paper contains the following two clueful passages:

The Creative Commons initiative, which started in the USA, is gaining ground in different European countries. It provides a set of user-friendly online licenses giving creators of content the opportunity to protect some of their rights, while giving away others.

and

London’s Wellcome Trust, one of Europe’s largest charities, is planning to launch a system that will archive all papers produced by its grantees in a digital library. Wellcome will require researchers to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript within 6 months of publication.

The European Digital Library: Dream, but Don't Touch

With all the brouhaha over the Google Book Search Library Project, it is easy to overlook other efforts directed along similar lines. I'm certainly guilty of this sin of omission when it comes to The European Library, about which I knew nothing until very recently.

The European Library is currently most useful for carrying out integrated searches across many European national libraries (I was disappointed to discover that neither Serbia nor Latvia has any of my books in their central libraries). Its holdings seem to be mainly bibliographic, rather than links to the actual text of books (though there are some exceptions).

However, a recent press release from the European Commission seems to indicate that The European Library could well be transmogrified into something altogether grander: The European Digital Library. According to the release:

At least six million books, documents and other cultural works will be made available to anyone with a Web connection through the European Digital Library over the next five years. In order to boost European digitisation efforts, the Commission will co-fund the creation of a Europe-wide network of digitisation centres.

Great, but it adds:

The Commission will also address, in a series of policy documents, the issue of the appropriate framework for intellectual property rights protection in the context of digital libraries.

Even more ominously, the press release concludes:

A High Level Group on the European Digital Library will meet for the first time on 27 March 2006 and will be chaired by Commissioner Reding. It will brings together major stakeholders from industry and cultural institutions. The group will address issues such as public-private collaboration for digitisation and copyrights.

"Stakeholders from industry and cultural institutions": but, as usual, nobody representing the poor mugs who (a) will actually use this stuff and (b) foot the bill. So will our great European Digital Library be open access? I don't think so.