From an EOD Announcement: From 3 to 4 November 2011, about 40 specialists of e-collections from European libraries meet in the National Library of Portugal. The eBooks on Demand (EOD) libraries have recently launched a common search engine for finding books which already are or will be digitised, and will have hackdays in Lisbon for providing information from library catalogues and repositories in social web and other platforms. The EOD search (http://search.books2ebooks.eu) currently makes available over 2.5 million records from 15 libraries, and gives direct access to already digitised items as well as books offered for digitisation on demand. “Our aim is...

From DigitalKoans: The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana have agreed to collaborate to make their systems interoperable, to share source code, and to engage in cooperative collection building. Here's an excerpt from the press release: Robert Darnton, a DPLA Steering Committee member and University Librarian at Harvard, said, "The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, videos, and other materials in many...

From the Association of European Research Libraries Blog: The first phase of ingestion of content has finally begun in Europeana Libraries It is now 8 months since the kick-off of the Europeana Libraries project and the first of the 5 million digital objects to be collected via Europeana Libraries have begun to be ingested. Between now and the end of 2011 1.5 million objects will be ingested. This means that 9 of the 47 collections included in the project will have been processed by the end of this year. The first phase of ingestion forms part of an ingestion schedule, which was...

From the press release: Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects to Europeana from 19 of Europe’s leading research and university libraries. The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe’s most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University....

From the press release: Today, the European Commission and the DCA consortium, comprising 25 partners from 10 EU member states and the 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland, have officially launched the project Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) initiating a significant increase in the presence of contemporary art in Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage. Over 30 months 21 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 27,000 contemporary artworks and 2,000 contextual documents, making them available through the Europeana portal. With the co-funding of the European Commission under the CIP-ICT PSP programme and the commitment of the 25 partners, the DCA...

From Europeana: The plan sets out a clear vision for the further development of Europeana. It focuses on four strategic tracks - aggregate, facilitate, distribute and engage - that will enable us to generate real value for our stakeholders. In the light of the release this week of The New Renaissance, the Comité des Sages’ report on digital cultural heritage to the Commission, this is an opportune moment to look at Europeana’s future direction. Download the full colour version or the black and white print version of the Strategic Plan 2011-2015. From the...

From a Europeana News Post: Over 1 million items showcasing Sweden’s cultural and scientific heritage can be now explored on Europeana, including architectural plans, photographs, paintings and maps. “There are many exciting discoveries to make. Europeana is an obvious platform for this information, and we are pleased that we are doing our bit to make heritage more accessible,” said Johan Carlström, project manager for Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH). SOCH is a web service that works with Sweden’s National Heritage Board to collect content from Swedish institutions. You can take a look at the new material by clicking this...

From a Ghent University Library Announcement: Ghent University Library today became the first in Europe to contribute public domain works scanned by Google to Europeana, Europe’s culture heritage. Readers using Europeana can now enjoy more than 30 million newly-added pages of historical, scientific, anthropological and literary works, from over 100,000 volumes, spanning four centuries, in French, Dutch, German and other languages. Joke Schauvliege, Flemish Minister of Environment, Nature and Culture and chair of the European Council of Environment is pleased that the unique and large collection of Ghent University leads the way....

From official Inside Google Books Blog: That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we'll be working in partnership to add to the library's own extensive digitisation efforts. We'll be scanning more than 160,000 of its public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books. The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library's website. And significantly for Europe, the library also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe's cultural portal. The books we'll be scanning constitute...

The Parliament's Culture Committee calls for more books, maps, film clips and photograhs to be provided to the portal, and these should come from more countries, as well. The Committee says that member states' contributions are very uneven. The site currently hosts only 5% of all digital books, with almost half coming from France, 16% from Germany and 8% from the UK and the Netherlands respectively. The Committee's report "urges the [European] Commission and member states to take all necessary steps to avoid a knowledge gap between Europe and non-EU countries, particularly the USA, stressing the importance of making...