Digital Libraries
Making knowledge accessible
Libraries have been around for a long time but technology has changed how we access them. Friedel Grant of The European Library looks at some of the things on offer from digital libraries and what the future will hold
Gathering Europe’s resources in one place, digitally T
he Library of Alexandria opened its doors around 2,300 years ago, with a mission to collect the entire world’s printed works in one place. When the library burned to the ground a
few hundred years later, scholars estimate it may have held between 400,000 and 700,000 volumes – an impressive total for the age. Fast-forward to current times and the amount of world culture accessible online is expanding at a rapid rate. Any collection with fewer than a million objects seems a very small total indeed for a modern digital library. Websites offering access to tens of millions of records from global memory institutions are now plentiful. From our own offi ce, we provide access to
200 million records from Europe’s national libraries via The European Library website, and our colleagues at Europeana link the public to 19 million objects from Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Our resources are constantly expanding,
thanks to strong support from governments and institutions, as well as an ever-increasing demand from the academic sector for more online access to high-quality information.
(1.5 billion library records), Trove (246 million records) and Google Books (over 15 million books), along with smaller projects such as Old Bailey Online are just a few
‘Too often, our cultural treasures are spread across multiple websites and providers, rather than integrated in a single database’
One upcoming source of content is the Europeana Libraries project, which we are leading. It will make fi ve million digitised items from major European research libraries available to users of both The European Library and Europeana websites. The general public, meanwhile, can contribute to the world of digital culture through projects such as Europeana 1914-1918, which is creating an online archive of personal photographs, family memorabilia and documents from the First World War. We’re not the only ones on a mission to make knowledge more accessible. WorldCat
Some of Europe’s online projects
The European Library is a free service that gives access to the digital and bibliographical resources of Europe’s 48 national libraries. In addition, The European Library aggregates and delivers digital content from national libraries to Europeana – a portal that links to over 19 million items from Europe’s archives, museums, libraries and audio-visual collections. From 2011, The European Library is also leading the Europeana Libraries project. It will gather fi ve million digital objects from leading European research libraries and make these items freely accessible on the websites of both The European Library and Europeana.
www.researchinformation.info
examples among many of how the internet is giving access to vast swathes of records that were previously only available physically. Many might say that lovers of culture and academic researchers have never had it so good: access to an unprecedented corpus of material and the ability to locate and capture millions of items from their own desks. And yet the future promises much more. A key focus for the coming years will be
on making records and digital items easier to fi nd, from a single point of access. Too often, our cultural treasures are spread across multiple websites and providers, rather than integrated in a single database. As an aggregator of library material across Europe, The European Library already takes the digital collections and bibliographic records of dozens of institutions and makes them accessible through one searchable database. We are now working on a new portal that
will allow researchers instantly to search and retrieve a wealth of full-text scholarly material, including nearly 600,000 books and e-theses.
OCT/NOV 2011 Research Information 15
FEATURE
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