Aiming high is rarely the wrong thing to do, in my opinion, and Jonathan Purday’s presentation, at the Eurolis Seminar Doom or Boom of Europeana, a digital library offering a single, direct and multilingual interface to cross-domain European cultural artefacts certainly wasn’t short of lofty aims. Europeana isn’t just about making library resources available, it’s about breaking down the cultural institution-based silos right across the European cultural sector, and in the process it has created an exciting online resource for the public, researchers and teachers and learners in education.

It’s easy for British people to forget the risk that the Google Book Project will overshadow non-English artefacts in Europe, and this has been an important concern since at least 2005, when the European Commission launched its Digital Libraries initiative. Initiatives such as Europeana are, in Purday’s words “making available the intellectual record of other languages”. And it will also “harmonise digitisation practices across Europe”. All good stuff.

It was also great that Purday acknowledged that every search now begins with Google, and that if you don’t find material, you think it hasn’t been digitised or it doesn’t exist. I and a number of delegates were left wondering at the end of the session, though, whether the full text of content in Europeana will be exposed to Google, and if Purday could come back on that point, that would be useful.

It’s worth mentioning that every single speaker at the Eurolis seminar mentioned the need to consider copyright harmonisation and Purday was no exception, but he probably deployed the most powerful arguments to support this. We can’t digitise at the scale now technologically possible, he argued, unless we reconsider and harmonise copyright, he said, and that the risk was of creating a “20th century black hole”, whereby we will be unable to represent the published output of “the most documented century” and we will end up with a distorted picture of the past as a result.

I would urge people to take a look at Europeana. The search interface is available in 26 languages, and in the next 2 years they plan to be able to translate search terms on the fly (currently only the interface is translated). Purday demonstrated a search on Don Quixote, which not only came up with an impressive range of book editions, but also images inspired by the work, plus videos, including a 1956 news broadcast in which Salvador Dali recreates a vision of Don Quixote at Moulin de la Galette. Europeana holds metadata in the central index and takes the user back to the original site to look at the full artefact, so decentralised and collaborative in a sustainable way.

Europeana is currently attracting 15,000 users a day. Purday is concerned, though, that most people interested in the site are over the age of 45. He plans to address this by creating an API so users can put Europeana into their own web space, although in discussions afterwards, people wondered whether such a measure would succeed in engaging younger people.