Digital libraries: German Digital Library for the 21st century

The German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, DBB) wants to make millions of books, films, images and audio recordings accessible online. More than 30,000 libraries, museums, archives and scientific collections across Germany are expected to contribute their digitized cultural artifacts. The first trial version may go online in 2011 - "and that will only be for a restricted group of users," says Ute Schwens, a director of the German National Library in Frankfurt.

Germany's federal cabinet gave the green light in early December. The goal is to integrate the DDB with Europeana, the European portal launched in 2008 with similar ambitions.

Germany's Culture Minister Bernd Neumann calls the long-term vision a "project of the century." The initiators promise a virtual chamber of wonders, as suitable for lay people as it will be for researchers hunting specific sources and scientific documents. The German Library Association is proposing to digitize around 5.5 million volumes in the first 10 years.

Digitization is also a measure against the vulnerability of the book as a medium. A 2004 fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar destroyed 50,000 volumes, some of them irreplaceable. Digital backup copies could limit such losses in future.

And the search technology will be more sophisticated than just looking up terms, as offered by Google. The DDB collections (under the current plan) will be indexed according to a range of criteria - place, time, subject area. Such an index can only work if the objects are described in detail.