"In a letter of 28 April 2005 to the Presidency of Council and to the Commission, six Heads of State and Government advocated the creation of a virtual European library, aiming to make Europe's cultural and scientific record accessible for all. The Commission has welcomed this plan and will contribute to it through the i2010 flagship initiative on digital libraries....

The quantity and diversity of material in Europe's libraries and archives is impressive. The total number of books and bound periodicals (volumes) in European libraries (EU 25) was 2,533,893,879 in 2001....

The main reason for digitising this material is to make it available to users in an online environment. In some cases, however, digitisation is not primarily used to make content more accessible, but to guarantee its survival. This concerns in the first place audiovisual material, where analogue formats deteriorate with time, and precious material is lost....

At present, only a small part of European collections has been digitised. Digitisation activities exist in all the Member States, but efforts are fragmented and progress has been relatively slow. This was underlined by the announcement of the Google initiative to digitise 15 million books from four major libraries in the US and one in Europe. If realised as planned, the Google initiative by far exceeds the efforts at national level in any of the Member States. Also in other parts of the world digitisation efforts are being stepped up. In India and China there are, for example, ambitious digitisation agendas in place covering material in different languages.

A number of challenges impact the pace and efficiency of digitisation in Europe.

Financial challenges: Digitisation is labour-intensive and costly. It takes a considerable upfront investment, which in most cases goes beyond the means of the institutions holding the information....

Organisational challenges: A 'digitise once, distribute widely' strategy can benefit all the organisations involved. Duplication of effort - digitising the same works or collections several times - must be avoided. This can only be achieved by a sustained co-ordination effort at national and European level. The latter can also enhance European added-value, where the final result is more than the sum of the parts.

New ways of working are necessary to make digitisation happen. Partnerships with or sponsoring by the private sector could contribute, but this type of partnership is not yet well developed....

Technical challenges: A key technical challenge is the need to improve digitisation techniques in order to make digitisation - for audiovisual material as well as books - more cost-efficient and affordable. For digitising written texts improved automatic book and document feeding equipment is necessary, as well as higher performance optical and intelligent character recognition for languages other than English.

English-language optical character recognition (OCR) systems have been tested and run on most print fonts over the past 10 to 15 years, and have been enhanced by automatic or semi-automatic spelling correction algorithms. Similar systems for other languages are less advanced, which leads to higher costs and lower quality results.

Legal challenges: Digitisation presupposes making a copy, which can be problematic in view of intellectual property rights (IPR). Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society foresees an exception for specific acts of reproduction by publicly accessible libraries, educational establishments, museums or archives. The exception is however not mandatory and has led to different implementations in the Member States. The limited use that can be legally made of the resulting digital copies is a further disincentive for digitisation.

The traditional model of library services based on lending of the physical items they own is not easily translatable to the digital environment. Under current EU-law and international agreements, material resulting from digitisation can only be made available online if it is in the public domain or with the explicit consent of the rightholders. Therefore a European digital library will in principle be focused on public domain material.

For literature, this means that only works from the early 1900s or before are available without copyright restrictions, depending on the year of death of the author. But even if works are out of copyright, the situation is not always straightforward. There may be rights attached to the different editions of a work that is itself no longer protected by copyrights, for example rights to introductions, covers and typography.

An online library offering works beyond public domain material is not possible without a substantial change in the copyright legislation, or agreements, on a case by case basis, with the rightholders.

In this context, the clarification and transparency of the copyright status of works is very relevant. In some cases, the costs of establishing the IPR-status of a work will be higher than its digitisation and bringing it online. This is particularly true for so called 'orphan works' - films or books for which it is impossible or very difficult to determine who are the rightholders. These elements are highlighted in the staff working paper and the online consultation accompanying this document.

Questions of online accessibility are not limited to intellectual property rights. Putting material online does not mean it can be found easily by the user, still less that it can be searched and used. Appropriate services allowing the user to discover and work with the content are necessary. This implies structured and quality description of the content, both the collections and the items in them, and support for its use (e.g. annotation)...."