The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has launched a prototype of the European Digital Library (Europeana).
Here’s an excerpt from "France Launches Francophone Digital Library":
Europeana—as the cyber library is named—currently offers access to some 12,000 public domain full-text documents but is set to have by 2010 over 6 million books, movies, photographs and other documents from across the European Union countries. . . .
"We want to make it so that Europe is not entirely abandoned to an American search engine," said Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the head of BNF, according to French press reports.
The "The European Digital Library in 16 Questions" provides further information about the project.
A press release about the launch is also available (in French).
…and a critic (in French) on my blog at http://www.nicolasmorin.com/blog/?p=307
Among other things: authentication not secure, search results giving out garbage results, etc…
Enjoyed reading your post.
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There are approximately 550 digital libraries separated alphabetically and by category, with over 500,000 unique ebooks
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Press Release The European Library June 2007
‘European Digital Library kicks off’
http://libraries.theeuropeanlibrary.org/press/Gearing_up_EDL_Press_release.pdf