Brussels, 16/10/2009 (Agence Europe) - All the publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952, even the rarest, are now accessible to the public online. The Frankfurt Book Fair, which opened on Friday 16 October, inaugurated the famous EU Bookshop Digital Library, located in Luxembourg. It consists of nearly 12 million pages that have been scanned, i.e. 110,000 European Union publications that can now be downloaded free of charge by users. “The digital library frees the memory of the European Union tied to paper since its beginning. The millions of pages now accessible to everyone in the 23 official languages demonstrate the continued commitment of the European Union to preserve and encourage the history of the Union in its linguistic diversity”, said Leonard Orban, Commissioner for Multilingualism..
The archives of the Publications Office contain rare documents on the history of Europe, such as the speech pronounced by Jean Monnet, President of the High Authority before the Common Assembly at the first session of September 1952, or the general report on the activities of the Community in French from 1953. Such documents had become inaccessible, being out-of-print. Given the growing demand for digitalisation of documents of this kind, the Office decided to scan all its archives. In less than two years, it has placed 12 million historic pages on line and nearly 2 million pages of recent publications. At the rate of 1,600 new publications annually, the European Digital Library will provide a valuable source of information for citizens in some 50 languages, with the possibility of ordering printed copies. The digitalised fund of the Publications Office will soon be accessible through Europeana. It will thus complement the national Europeana collections from the EU institutions' point of view. (I.L./transl.jl)