This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.

Why use Europeana? A wealth of diverse material - defined by format and national origins -- can be found and viewed quickly. It is the intent of Europeana to make Europe's open access and digitized cultural heritage more easily accessible and, in so doing, foster mutual understanding of that cultural diversity among Europeans and others.

Think of Europeana as a digital library, archive, and museum. It serves as an interface to books and other textual material, paintings and other images, films, and objects. More than 2,000 European institutions contribute. They span major, regional, and local participants. They represent Europe's cultural as well as scientific heritage and cover prehistory to the contemporary world. Euprpeana collects metadata; not the material itself. A searcher clicks through to the original site that holds the material.

Search Tips

European Library Portal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eohd8z0Akk. The European Library provided much of the organization and support needed to launch Europeana. It operates independently but continues to work closely with Europeana. The European Library is the aggregator of digital content from national libraries for Europeana and delivers digital content from them. The European Library provides access to full text digital material as well as to bibliographic records for which a digital image is not available. Its homepage advises: "We have more than 200 million resources waiting to be discovered. You can search over 24 million pages of full-text content, 18 million digital objects and 119 million bibliographic records within Europe.

These digital resources are supplied to us by our prestigious network of institutions, including 48 national libraries in Europe and an increasing number of research libraries, such as the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library."

Content

Linked items include a diversity of formats: text, image, sound, and moving image.

Prehistory forward.