The European Commission recently released a statement regarding Europeana – the European Digital Library that will be opening in November of this year. I haven’t heard much about this, but the plan is to build a portal to European digitized collections, allowing the public to have access to the historical riches of Europe. It’s quite a neat idea, but I can’t help but think that the goal of having “an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre” might be a little far-fetched.
It seems to be very public oriented, looking at broad, thematic areas such as music, crime and punishment, travel and tourism. They’re hoping that they’ll get researchers to use it as well (though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me), but it is primarily aimed at the ‘interested public’, whoever they are.
It’s being funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, which is a programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, which is a laudable, if rather vague goal. The project is being run from the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and has partner institutions throughout the rest of Europe.
The idea is that it will just be a portal site, with federated search across all the member organisations collections, and with the complete digital object staying on the site it belongs to – the Bundesarchiv or British Library, for example.
I think it’s kinda a neat idea – digitisation is a good idea, at least from an archival point of view, if nothing else – but I’m not entirely convinced that it will be used. I expect it’ll end up languishing, like much of the public-oriented Europa sites, unnoticed, unusable and neglected. I don’t really know who they’re aiming it at – they might get a little further, and make it a little more practical if they did just aim the project at the researchers and academics that are far more likely to use it, rather than pretending that there is this great public desire for digitised historical documents. The public should certainly have access to such things, but it isn’t really high on the agenda for your average European citizen.
It might behoove the Commission to think a little more about who they’re marketing these things to, and how to market it appropriately, before spending all this money on projects that no one will use.
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August 19th, 2008 at 12:36 am
No one will use? Why I have already ordered my euro library card to get my inter library loans on the go. Spot’s excellent adventure in Esperanto – an under appreciated classic …
August 19th, 2008 at 8:15 am
You say ‘though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me’ Well, they’d have to know exactly where the stuff was – for example, I wouldn’t know where to start looking for all Chopin’s manuscripts – Paris, or Warsaw…and which institutions ?Europeana will index museum and library holdings that search engines don’t reach. Also, if you’re interested, say, in a particular writer, and don’t know where her letters, manuscripts, annotated editions, photographs of, objects belonging to etc are held, then Europeana will be the place to start. It will bring disparate materials together from achives, libraries, museums, audio-visual collections.
I should declare an interest – I work for the project.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Jonathan
My primary concern/confusion over this is that I don’t know who it’s aimed at and how it’s going to be marketed.
The general public, by and large, aren’t going to be interested in highly specfic archival material, and those that are will probably have the skills to find it. And if you’re marketing at the public, then I’m concerned about visibility and use. They have to know it’s there before they can use it – how are you planning on marketing Europeana so you’re average EU citizen with an interest in manuscripts (or wahtever) will know it exists?
The specialised academic, on the other hand, who may have a need for all of Chopin’s manuscripts/letters/whatever, say, probably will have the resources to track this information down already. They don’t really need access to a starting point for their research, as they’ll have already done that. And again there’s the issue of access – academics already have a great many resources to hand, how will they learn about this new one?
Don’t get me wrong, I think that the concept is sound and of value, but I’m just now sure at the moment who is going to extract the value from the product. And it would be a shame to let such hard work on such an interesting project go to waste.
April 3rd, 2010 at 12:41 pm
[...] Hemsworth, Jonathan Purday, Gill Rocca, Alessandra Raho, Paul Plews, Melanie Russell, Martin …Enquiring Minds Want to Know A digital library for Europe?Jonathan Purday Says: August 19th, 2008 at 8:15 am. You say though why they wouldn't use the [...]