News Report #5

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQBJ3FLg32GX_cAVFLQo1feO6Ckg

In the article, Massive EU Online Library Looks to Compete with Google, the author describes the newest breach in technology. Thursday, November 20, 2008, the EU is launching it’s Europeana digital library to bring together many of the great works that have been collected throughout libraries worldwide. This new technology is not just limited to books either, it will consist of artwork, published readings, films, maps, sound recordings, newspapers, manuscripts, documents, and much more.
The point of this development is that the common person can simply click a button and access libraries and other information storing facilities without having to travel halfway across the globe. Reeding stated that Europeana gives a chance to, "give greater visibility to all the treasures hidden deep in our libraries, museums and archives and compare masterpieces that were, until now, spread around the four corners of the globe."
The prototype that is to be released today will include two million digital items and can be found at www.europeana.eu, which was composed by just 14 staff members. The goal is to have around ten million pieces of work on the site by the year 2010 which is still quite minuscule compared to the 2.5 billion books that contained in Europe’s common libraries.
This digitalization was first attempted by Microsoft in 2006 but was abandoned 18 months later due to the massive amount of time and effort such a project will take. Also, Google claims to have around seven million books available on it’s “Google Book Search” which became available in 2004. Europeana hopes to outnumber that in time.
I believe that this is one of the biggest steps in the scholarly world to date. The idea of being able to access some of the most fascinating works ever invented is quite intriguing and I hope that everything goes according to plan. The only thing I fear is the idea that having all these books at the click of a mouse will interfere with the importance of libraries. I still feel that it is important to be able to actually go into a library and see all that they have to offer to the public.