EU Bookshop Digital library
Jinfo Blog

22nd October 2009

By Diana Nutting

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Launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 16th October 2009, the EU Bookshop Digital Library provides 14 million scanned pages in more than 110,000 EU publications in the 23 official languages, free of charge for download. It includes all publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952, including official statistics from 1953 to the present. (http://digbig.com/5bamhq). As well as historical data new publications are added daily, with the whole service comprising 12 million scanned pages of historic publications and about 2 million pages of recent publications. New publications are added at a rate of 1,600 a year. As well as the official languages some publications are also available in Chinese, Russian and around 20 other languages. The Publications Office Digital Library was a response to a growing demand to digitise out-of-print publications. In 2007, the Publications Office launched a PDF-on-demand service, wherein users could request publications to be retrieved from the archives and scanned as needed; demand was so high that within six months the service was saturated. To better serve the users, it was decided to scan the entire archive. 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. EU Bookshop content is also to become accessible via Europeana, a digitisation project of many national European libraries and archives (http://digbig.com/5bamhr).

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