Media News - Monday, October 19, 2009

EU gives free online access to its archives

The EU on Sunday used the book fair in Frankfurt to launch its online digital library of official documents issued in the last 50 years. The EU's so-called digital bookshop puts more than 12 million scanned pages online, to be downloaded for free by anyone interested. The oldest document is a 1952 speech by Jean Monnet which inaugurated the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community, later to become the EU. Apart from the bloc's 23 official languages, some publications are also available in Chinese, Russian and around 20 other languages. The equivalent of four kilometres of bookshelves were scanned from February 2008 at a cost of about EUR 2.5 million and will also be included in Europeana, a mammoth project aimed at digitising several national libraries and arts museums all over the EU. The move comes also amid fierce opposition by European publishers to the free online books project of US giant Google. (EU Observer)

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