Europeana Gives Open Access to Over 14 Million Examples of Europe's Cultural Heritage

Launched in 2008 with two million objects, the European digital library, Europeana, now provides free online access to over 14 million digitized books, maps, photographs, paintings, film and music clips from cultural institutions across Europe. Thus, Europeana has already passed the initial target for 2010 of 10 million objects.

From the press release:

Digitised photographs, maps, paintings, museum objects and other images make up 64% of the Europeana collection. 34% of the collection is dedicated to digitised texts, including more than 1.2 million complete books that can be viewed online and/or downloaded. The texts cover thousands of rare manuscripts and the earliest printed books (incunabula) from before 1500. Video and sound material represents less than 2% of the collections. Much of the material accessible through Europeana is older, i.e. out of copyright, items, due mainly to the difficulties and cost of rights clearance to digitise and give access to in-copyright material (even for material that is no longer commercially distributed or out-of-print) or material whose potential right-holders are unknown (orphan works).