Europeana Tops 5 million Items

Europeana’s collection of on-line European heritage passed the 5 million mark in early December, taking the multilingual digital library, museum and archive over halfway to its target of 10 million searchable items in 2010.

Copernicus courtesy of Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych

Portraits of notable Polish figures, including astronomer Copernicus and composer Frederic Chopin are among the newest additions to Europeana – part of some 257,000 images, texts, videos and sounds that were submitted by regional groups across Poland. The influx takes the proportion of Polish items on Europeana from 0.4 percent of the total to 5.5 percent.

“Connection with Europeana is a crucial milestone for the long process of the development of the Polish digital libraries infrastructure,” says Marcin Werla, Digital Libraries Team Leader at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which has been leading the Polish project to feed digitized items into Europeana.

“As the first country from the EuropeanaLocal project, we were able to connect several hundreds of cultural and scientific institutions from the entire country.”

The achievement is a milestone not just for Europeana but also for EuropeanaLocal.

Content will keep flowing from EuropeanaLocal. Hundreds of thousands of new items from the UK and Norway have already been processed and are live in the service. EuropeanaLocal aims to add some 3 million items to the Europeana database by mid-2010, making it one of the biggest contributing projects.

B.M.