THE EUROPEAN Union unveiled its virtual library yesterday, giving internet users access to more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, paintings and films from the 27 member states.
The documents and recordings have been provided to www.europeana.eu by more than 1,000 national libraries and cultural institutions. The online library plans to offer access to 10 million works by 2010.
Visitors to the website will be able to read a book, play a video or listen to an audio recording, but the cultural institutions keep full control over the content, which is stored on their servers. The site is available in almost all official EU languages with Maltese and Bulgarian to be added soon.
University College Cork (UCC) is Ireland's national representative on the project and has already provided digitised maps and manuscripts from its archival collection.
Other institutions such as the National Library have also provided items to the library and items of Irish interest have been provided by institutions such as the British Library.
Ireland's input to the library, at less than 0.1 per cent, is dwarfed by France, which has provided more than half the items, and the UK, which has provided 10 per cent.
John Fitzgerald, UCC's library director, said he expected that the Irish content would increase in the coming months.
Cultural institutions can only offer items which have been digitised so they can be displayed, or played, from a computer. Only 1 per cent of items in Europe's libraries and cultural institutions are digitised, so the European Commission is encouraging member states to use structural funds for specific digitisation projects.
Examples of items now available on the site include Beethoven's 9th Symphony; the "Topographia Hiberniae" - a map from the 11th century representing the location of Ireland in Europe; footage of the demolition of the Berlin Wall; the British Magna Carta of 1215; Dante's Divine Comedy, and pictures of the house and tomb of the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei.
The website will initially offer access to items mainly in the public domain, but the commission is examining ways of adding copyright material to its stock.
Public interest overwhelmed the site yesterday. It shut down several times and experienced significant technical difficulties when it received more than 10 million hits an hour.
Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism Martin Cullen said the site offered great potential to broaden access to culture throughout the EU, encouraging young people to discover Europe's vast cultural heritage.
European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said Europeana was "a veritable dynamo to inspire 21st century Europeans to emulate the creativity of innovative forebears like the drivers of the Renaissance".
