| The European Library The European Library is a free service that offers access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe. Resources can be both digital (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.) and bibliographical. The amount of referenced digital collections is constantly increasing. Quality and reliability are guaranteed by the 48 collaborating national libraries of Europe. The partners in The European Library are all members of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), a foundation aiming at increasing and reinforcing the role of national libraries in Europe. Background - from project...The European Library started life as a partly European Union funded project in 2003. The project was successfully completed at the end of January 2004, underlining the resolution by CENL, the Conference of European National Librarians, to support the vision for a European Library service. ...to serviceInnovation is the key to the future of The European Library service. The European Library will continue to apply for funding to support its development work. In future, we plan to extend membership to major research libraries of Europe. The European Library also seeks to offer value-added services to its target user groups, specifically, the academic and research communities. An Organisational ModelTo date, the portal enables end users to search across 150 million titles, from 386 collections in 31 European national libraries and browse through the collections of 48 European national libraries. The European Library integrated access allows for cross collection searching, it enables collection level searching and delivers integrated results. It also gives access to non-digital resources as well as general information about the CENL libraries. The European Library, an aggregator... but not onlyThe introduction of online exhibitions in July 2007 has been significantly beneficial: the new environment has become increasingly successful and entered the top 3 most visited pages of the portal in April 2009. The European Library is multilingual. At launch, three languages - French, German and English - were available for most of the website interface. Subsequent releases have increased availability of the portal to the other 30 plus languages of the nations represented. At the same time, there has been funded research into multilingual searching. The European Library and EuropeanaIn many ways, The European Library provided the organisational foundation for the "European digital library: Europeana". The vision of Europeana is established as follows: "A digital library that is a single, direct and multilingual access point to the European cultural heritage." (European Parliament, 27 September 2007). To realise this vision, CENL, under the auspices of the National Library of the Netherlands and its service The European Library, were asked to submit for a project under the eContentplus programme. Partners
ContactsLinksThe European Library: www.theeuropeanlibrary.org |
- co-funded by the European Union
