Learning from new neighbours
They may be newcomers to the European Union, but some of the most recently joined Member States are no novices when it comes to developing their digital library collections, partners in a recently completed project of the 'European Library', TEL-ME-MOR, have concluded. The two-year project, which ended in January, sought to bring the digital collections of the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland and Slovakia into the European Library, an initiative which aims to connect the collections of national libraries through a multilingual searchable interface. It became apparent during the digitisation process that being new helped these Members States to overcome some obstacles that their predecessors were unable to avoid. They were able for example to bypass the legacy of non-web technologies, which often proved burdensome for countries that adopted them early on. This perhaps explains in part why these countries were able to digitise proportionally more material than the older Member States. Nearly half of the collections submitted were also found to be open archive initiative (OAI) compliant and thus able to be harvested into a central database and manipulated in a way that remotely held collections cannot. Between them the nine new Member States added nearly one million digitised items to the European Library. Currently the European Library gives access to 150 million entries from 23 of the 47 national libraries participating in the project. Resources can be digital or bibliographical (books, posters, maps, sound recordings and videos). In addition to helping the new Member States increase the sum of material available to users, TEL-ME-MOR produced several reports on the creation of a European Digital Library, the next step in the goal of centralising Europe's national library resources. One report showed again how the national libraries of new Member States have as much expertise and competence in the domain of cultural heritage and digitisation research and development as those in the neighbouring countries. Some of concepts and recommendations proposed by TEL-ME-MOR on the multilingual development of the European Library portal will now be put to the test by researchers in the EDLproject. Launched in September 2006, the project will works towards the integration of the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the national libraries of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden, into the European Library.