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A meeting on 27 November 2007 of a high level group on digital libraries and officials of the European Commission formalised the agreement between European libraries, archives and museums in a common effort to create a European digital library that would give access to a common European cultural and scientific heritage.
 
The EU European Digital Libraries initiative is part of "i2010: European Information Society 2010" initiative launched in June 2006 with the purpose to "foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries", followed, in August 2006, by the adoption of the Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation urging "EU Member States to set up large-scale digitisation facilities so as to accelerate the process of getting Europe's cultural heritage on line via the European digital library".
 
In this sense, Member States were encouraged to tackle questions related to copyright and "the systematic preservation of digital content in order to ensure long term access to the material". The idea of European Digital Libraries was backed by the Culture Ministers of all EU Member States and by a resolution adopted by the European Parliament on 27 September 2007.

Recently, a European digital library foundation has been created gathering European associations that represent museums, libraries and archives. According to Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding, the creation of the foundation "shows the commitment of Europe's cultural institutions to work together and make their collections available and searchable to the wide public through a common and multilingual access point online".

The launching of a European digital library prototype is planned for November 2008. The prototype will give direct access to at least 2 million digital books, records, photographs, maps, films from the European libraries, archives and museums. It is foreseen that by 2010 the digital library will exceed the initially targeted 6 million digital objects.
 
The success of the initiative depends on the financing of the digitisation and on finding solutions to make copyrighted works searchable through the European digital library. Therefore, the discussions during the meeting on 27 November were focused on finding new ways to finance digitisation through public private partnerships, in finding solutions for mass-digitisation of out of print works and orphan works and on issues related to access to and preservation of scientific information.
 
The group decided to find an agreement by June 2008 to deal with orphan works that would be including criteria to look for rightholders and an agreement was also reached by libraries, scientists and scientific publishers to experiment open access to scientific publications which have been under embargo during the last period.

Launch of European digital library "on track" (28.11.2007)

EDRI-gram: European Parliament resolution on a European digital library (10.10.2007)

EDRI-gram: Copyright clearing for EU digital libraries project (25.04.2007)