EC rivals Google with digital library plan

The European Commission is not prepared to sit back and let Google get a monopoly on the world's information and is establishing a strategy to turn Europe's "historical and cultural heritage into digital content".

According to an EC announcement, the aim is to digitise and preserve records of Europe's heritage - including books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music - and make it available online to all European citizens. To make this happen, the EU is proposing high-level co-operation between the member states and has set a deadline of 20 January, 2006, for the first comments on the plans.

Launching the proposals, Viviane Reding, the information society and media commissioner, said: "Without a collective memory, we are nothing and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure."

The Commission acknowledged that making the resources in Europe's libraries and archives available on the internet "is not straightforward" and sets out three key areas for action; digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation. It also acknowledged that several initiatives are already under way within Europe such as the Collect Britain project in the UK which is backed by the British Library and part-funded by the National Lottery.

The issue of collecting the heritage of the world, and in particular its literature, has come into sharp focus recently with Google's efforts to amass the world's knowledge in one search engine. That plan hit legal problems last month as Google came under attack for ''a plain and brazen violation of copyright law" by a group representing thousands of authors in the US.

Yahoo! has launch a similar scheme but with the specific permission of copyright holders.