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Bringing Europe’s cultural treasures to a new generation
Imagine you have gold in a vault but you forgot where the key is. In times of crisis, there are not many treasures that Europe can use to boost growth and prosperity. There is one treasure we have however in Europe, for which we need a new digital key: our cultural heritage – the many millions of historical artefacts and works of art which sit in Europe’s museums, galleries, and libraries – which is unparalleled across the world. Read the full entry
Great news today. With President Barroso’s blessing, we’ve brought together Maurice Lévy (CEO of Publicis), Elisabeth Niggemann (Head of the German National Library) and Jacques De Decker (writer) to come up with recommendations on how best to speed up the digitisation, online accessibility and preservation of cultural works across Europe.
Lack of money and rigid laws are no excuse for keeping this rich cultural legacy out of the digital world – we must make this legacy available to all.
The “Comité des sages” will reflect on the trends set by the Google Books project and others digital projects. My great hope is that we will find new ways to boost Europe’s digital library: Europeana. With over 7 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings and musical extracts, we are off to a good start with Europeana but there are tens of millions of items still to be made available.