EU launches digital library at Frankfut Book FairThe
European Union used the world's biggest book fair to launch the EU
Bookshop's digital library, making more than 50 years of documents in
about 50 languages available for free on the Internet.
Individuals,
companies and isolated libraries from northern Sweden to the mountains
of Bulgaria, and anyone from Australia to Zambia can download files
dating back to 1952 when six countries created what is now the
27-member EU.
"With the digital library, we have total
transparency" of EU legislative and cultural publications, Commissioner
for Multilinguism Leonard Orban told AFP at the Frankfurt Book Fair on
Sunday.
The project also underpins "the commitment of the
European Union to preserve and encourage the history of the union in
its linguistic diversity," he added.
The library's oldest
document is a speech by Jean Monnet to inaugurate the High Authority of
the Coal and Steel Community, the EU's precursor.
>From four
official languages at its start, the union now counts 23, but some
publications are also available in Chinese, Russian and around 20 other
languages.
Orban voiced hope that the digital library would be "an additional tool for
combating prejudices."
On a practical level he added: "No one can complain now of problems consulting
legislative texts and associated documents."
Topics
covered by EU institutions, agencies and other bodies include
education, the environment, health and transport, an EU statement said.
Official statistics from 1953 to the present are also available.
The
library counts around 140,000 publications today, and 1,500 "born
digital" ones are added each year. More pre-digital documents will also
be scanned into the system.
Roughly 110,000 publications or 12
million pages -- the equivalent of four kilometres (2.5 miles) of
bookshelves -- were scanned from EU archives from February 2008 at a
cost of about 2.5 million euros (3.75 million dollars).
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