The magazine of the european research area European Commission Copenhagen, a missed chance?

SCIENCE AT YOUR 

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Set of dinosaur footprints at the Plagne palaeontological site (FR).

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IN BRIEF

 research

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eu No. 63 | APRIL 2010 

41

choose their video format (it can 

be an advertisement, a marketing 

video, or even a song, for instance) 

and can use any of the visual 

elements appearing on the 

TyroSafe website. Although video 

entries are accepted in any 

language, non-English-language 

videos must be subtitled in English. 

  http://www.youtube.com/

http://tyrosafetyrosafe.fehrl.org

Culture surfing

While Google is striving to digitise 

all the world’s books, Europe’s 

ambition is to bring together 

online its own rich cultural herit-

age under the Europeana label, 

pooling the vast collections held 

in libraries, archive centres and 

museums throughout Europe. 

These include an impressive 

number of books and periodicals 

(some 2.5 billion documents 

in libraries alone) and millions 

of hours of film and video on 

European history and culture. 

Europeana was put into operation 

in November 2008 and this gigan-

tic virtual collection already 

houses 4.6 million digital items 

in 19 languages (including books, 

maps, works of art, posters, photos 

and audiovisual archives). 

Not only is Europeana a cultural 

challenge, it is also a communica-

tion technology challenge. It has 

been a particularly complex task to 

put into motion this diverse 

network of partners with very 

different cultural management 

backgrounds. Content contributors 

must each comply with the stand-

ards essential to such a shared 

enterprise. Then, consultation 

methods need to be devised to 

ensure that access is provided to 

a wide variety of users (including 

researchers, teachers and students, 

cultural enterprises and curious 

members of the public) in the most 

appropriate manner possible.

Europeana is well worth a visit: 

at the website portal you are 

presented with a variety of themes 

that invite you to embark on 

some socio-cultural surfing. Each 

item you visit will open up new 

pathways. The site also features 

a timeline navigator where you 

can click on a year from 1801 

to 2007 to view images from 

that era. As its home page states, 

Europeana really is a “place for 

inspiration and ideas”.

The UNESCO World Digital Library 

(WDL), which opened in April 

2009, is a broader global venture. 

It makes available to a general 

audience a wide variety of docu-

ments in libraries and cultural 

institutions all around the world. 

So far, 26 institutions from 

19 countries have contributed 

content to the WDL, in Arabic, 

Chinese, English, French, Portu-

guese, Russian and Spanish. 

With the WDL, UNESCO aims to 

expand the volume and variety 

of cultural content on the Internet 

and to narrow the digital divide 

within and between countries.