France Provides Half The Content For Europe’s Digital Library

France has, to date, provided almost half of all the content submitted from across the continent to Europe’s digital online library Europeana.

Europeana was launched by the European Union in 2008 in order to provide citizens with access to books and other artefacts documenting the continent’s broad and diverse heritage. Since its launch, France has supplied 47% of all content followed by Germany’s contribution of 16% with the UK and the Netherlands at 8% apiece and other European nations lagging behind.

This week the European Parliament’s Culture Committee has called for all member states to contribute more film, photographs and books to the project which currently hosts only 5% of all digital books.

The committee’s report also looks to encourage a more even contribution across nations, urging members “not to restrict availability to the territory of their country”, comments EurActiv.

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The EU is keen to enaure that the Europeana portal becomes a central hub for cultural and scientific information and research in order to avoid the emergence of a knowledge gap between Europe and other geographies, particularly the USA.

Europeana faces stiff competition in the shape of Google Books, a project which also plans to digitise content, with the European parliament raising concerns around the control and distribution of such data being the responsibility of a private organisation.

Last month The Next Web reported on the EUScreen project which is to supply over 30,000 of television programming content to Europeana from across the continent.