Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links people to 6 million digital items:

• Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects;
• Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers;
• Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts;
• Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts.

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe's museums and galleries, archives, libraries, and audio-visual collections. Europeana connects to a list of organisations from which the content comes from. Included is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as well as the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris.

People can use My Europeana to save searches or bookmark things, or can highlight stuff and add it to their own folders.

The Europeana website is a prototype. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 10 million digital objects.Europeana.eu is funded by the European Commission and the member states.

More about:

• How Europeana came to be developed: the background to the project
• The deliverables from the project: technical plans etc
• New projects that will be channelling material into Europeana Version 1.0
  • EuropeanaLocal
  • European Film Gateway
• How organisations can contribute content to Europeana
• Getting in contact with the Europeana team
• To be added to the press list
• The e-news to keep you in touch with developments

Resource: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/aboutus.html

Europeana Portal
i2010: Digital Libraries Initiative - Europe's cultural and scientific riches at a click of a mouse