New EU Member States integrate into European Digital Library

The project for a new European Digital Library by 2010 is a step closer since the national libraries of the new EU Member States are well on their way to integrating their content.

The EU funded information society technologies (IST) project, TEL-ME-MOR, whose role it is to ensure that the national libraries of the 10 new EU Member States are included in the objective of offering more than six million published works, says the project was 'well on its way'.

With content from 8 out of the 10 newly included national libraries already integrated into the European Digital Library, and most of these collections fully searchable, TEL-ME-MOR should meet the objective of turning the 10 partners into full members of the European Library by January 2007.

'The remaining two libraries are in the process of joining the service, and will become official members by the end of 2006,' said Toomas Schvak, spokesperson for the project. 'That means that altogether there will be fifty-two collections in the European Digital Library by January 2007, forty-one of them searchable and thirty-two containing digital content.'

The TEL-ME-MOR project also succeeded in achieving another of its goals: stimulating and facilitating the participation of organisations from the new Member States in IST projects.

'I think the TEL-ME-MOR project was an excellent example of how well cross-cultural cooperation can actually work, and how people and institutions from 'old' and 'new' Europe can join forces to build something they all desire,' said Mr Schvak.

By integrating national libraries into the European Digital Library to make Europe's cultural heritage available via one access point, European researchers should have an easier time accessing more sources for their research.

'The EU should also facilitate building the community of cultural and scientific content holders - in other words, cooperation and interoperability between libraries, museums and archives,' Mr Schvak concluded.

As well as the national libraries of the 10 new Member States, the other partners in the TEL-ME-MOR project are the National Libraries of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the British Library, Stichting Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) and Eremo in Italy, a company specialising in project management in the cultural heritage sector.