The collection contains 12,000 books, including 7,000 in French, 4,000 in Hungarian and 1,000 in Portuguese. But many more are expected to be added as the collection, called Europeana, grows.
Europeana is part of an initiative launched two years ago by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, as director of the Biblioth?que Nationale, to create a European digital library. Jeanneney's efforts were intended in part as a response to the Google Library Project, in which the search engine company is to digitise the collections of several libraries and place them online for public use free of charge. Jeanneney argued that the Google project has excluded many important European works of literature, showing a private US company can not be trusted to create a library sufficiently representative of cultures in Europe.
The Biblioth?que Nationale was awarded more than EUR 3 million to set up Europeana in 2006. This year, France's Ministry of Culture has allocated a further EUR 10 million for the project. Another 100,000 books will be added to Europeana from the summer of 2008.
Visit Europeana at http://www.europeana.eu/
Source: Múlt-kor
