Everyone's terrified of trashing Google, mainly because of the company's astonishing power in the marketplace, and because it has already digitized 7 million books that libraries want access to. "There's no Google-bashing," insists Maura Marx, executive director of the new Commons. "We need to ensure that there is a viable alternative and that access to knowledge remains open and does not become commodified."
The collector is forever nostalgic because the collector’s ethos is the consciousness of finitude. The collector wants to give commodities their aesthetic, artistic, sensory value back. Mass capitalism deprives objects from the experience of uniqueness; the collector wants to restore that lost unicity. In a way the collector is a ghost-hunter, forever immersed in the phatasmagoria of his imaginary and of the small shops that, unseen by the masses, are, as it were, only there for the collector.
Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.
The digital content will be selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. The prototype aims to have representative content from all four of these cultural heritage domains, and also to have a broad range of content from across Europe.
The interface will be multilingual. Initially, this may mean that it is available in French, English and German, but the intention is to develop the number of languages available following the launch.
