Europeana in an e-mail sent out today announced they have now passed 20 million items in their database.

The 20 millionth item is a painting of the Biblical story of David and Goliath painted by the celebrated Caravaggio in 1600-1601.

This is a tenfold increase since Europeana's launch in 2008. Europeana opens up metadata on cultural heritage items from collections all over the EU. With a strong commitment towards Creative Commons licensing and linked data, this mile stone is but one of a number of highlights for Europeana this year (such as the launch of the new portal, creating the Europeana Data Model, and organizing various hackathons to let developers explore the possibilities of re-using Europeana collection data.)

"For Europeana 2011 has been a year of growth. This is seen in the growth of our content from 15 to 20 million items, thanks largely to the huge efforts of all the partners and to the dedication of our Operations team and in the number of visitors to the site, which rose above 3 million a year in September 2011.", said Jill Cousins, Europeana's executive director.

Today Europeana also announced that the European Commission has favorably reviewed the first version of the Europeana project. This is a good result on which to further build the Europeana project version 2, that started in October 2011 and is scheduled to run until February 2014.

On December 12th the European Commission proposed a review of the PSI Directive, bringing cultural organisations within the scope of the PSI Directive, which undoubtedly will further support the development of Europeana and its network partners.