EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reading said "even though member states have made significant progress in making cultural content accessible on the Internet, more public and private investment is needed to speed up digitisation."
Digitisation of cultural works can give Europeans access to material from museums, libraries and archives abroad without having to travel or turn hundreds of pages to find a piece of information.
Europe's libraries alone contain more than 2.5 billion books, but only about 1 percent of archival material is available in digital form. The Commission therefore called on member states to do more to make digitised works available online for Europeans
The European Commission will provide some EUR 120 million in 2009-2010 for improving online access to Europe's cultural heritage. Realising the vision of a European Digital Library needs substantial investment from national institutions, but at present most countries only provide small scale, fragmented funding for digitisation.
The Commission has called on member states to raise digitisation capacities to make their collections available for Europe's citizens and team up with the private sector in this work.
Source: Múlt-kor / Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
