Related projects

Europeana
Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive is a prototype portal offering users direct access to more than 4 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers.
The portal was launched on 20 November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, in Brussels. According to the European Commission's plan, by 2010 it will include about 10 million digital objects.
The Europeana portal was created under EDLnet, a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme. It started in July 2007 and its work has been taken over by its successor Europeanav1.0.

Projects of interest in the context of the creation of Europeana

ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards Europeana)
Launched in December 2008, it is working towards the creation of an infrastructure for the management of any type of rights information, thus facilitating the actual implementation of innovative business models for both digital libraries and private digital content providers. The project will also create a European distributed registry of orphan works and access to network of existing clearance centres for out of print works.

CACAO (Cross-language access to catalogues and on-line libraries)
This 2-years project aims to enhance the multilingual capabilities of on-line digital libraries. As a result of the project's work, users will be able to type queries in their own language and retrieve documents and objects in any available language. The sound integration of CACAO's infrastructure designed for multilingual purposes with current digital library and catalogue systems will be obtained by coupling natural language processing techniques with existing information retrieval systems. As part of the Cacao Project three thematic portals for multilingual books, documents search about History of Europe, Mathematics and Geography have been developed. They are accessible from the project web site.

MIMO - Musical Instrument Museums Online
The project will digitise content and create a common access portal for musical instruments. MIMO will also provide access to its content through Europeana.

STERNA
The acronym stands for Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application. The project includes twelve European Natural History Museums and related institutions which hold content on biodiversity, wildlife and nature in general and that are working together to contribute their collections to the European Digital Library - Europeana.
STERNA specifically addresses small cultural heritage institutions and content providers that want to actively participate and contribute to Europeana but lack technical skills and financial resources.

TEL-ME-MOR
Funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. TEL-ME-MOR supported the 10 national libraries from the New Member States in becoming full members of The European Library. It also stimulated and facilitated the participation of organisations from the New Member States of the European Union in projects funded within the IST area.

Important Digitisation Projects

IMPACT
IMPACT is a project funded by the European Commission. It aims to significantly improve access to historical text and to take away the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage. The project started in January 2008 and will last 4 years.

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