The Hague, 3 February 2011,

Europeana.eu is Europe’s digital library, museum and archive. Launched as a prototype in November 2008, it offers access to some 15 million digitised items from Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage organisations, including resources from 48 national libraries of Europe. It is set to launch an API to their database this month, which enables other to re-use the data in their own context and applications.

Europeana has released the following statement to the press:

"Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs and handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe’s leading research and university libraries.

The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe’s most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University.

The assembled objects span centuries of European history. Manuscripts from Serbia date back as far as 1206 and relate to the Ottoman Empire’s European territories. Written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian, they are being digitised by the University Library of Belgrade. There will also be significant film additions. Footage of talks from 10 Nobel prize winners will be contributed by the University of Vienna and the Wellcome Trust Library in London will add 900 clips from medical science films produced over the past 100 years.

Europeana Libraries is notable not only for the content it will make available online but also because this project brings together national, research and university libraries under one umbrella, to make their materials available via Europeana.

The Europeana Libraries initiative is supported by key international library associations: the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER)."

Europeana Libraries is a 2-year project that will bring the digital collections of some of Europe’s leading research libraries to Europeana. Funded by the European Commission’s IST-PSP programme, Europeana Libraries will be the first cultural digitisation project to investigate full-text searching of the 5 million objects it adds to Europeana.