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.