Brussels, 05/12/2007 (Agence Europe) - The European cultural institutions are planning to launch a prototype of the European digital library in November 2008. It will then be possible directly to access more than 2 million digital books, photographs, cards and archive documents, as well as films from libraries, archives and European museums. A high-level group on digital libraries met Commission staff on Wednesday to take stock of progress made towards the launch of the European digital library. A foundation for the European digital library has just seen the light of day, making official the agreement between the archives, museums, audiovisual archives and libraries of Europe to work together and to provide a common point of access to the European cultural heritage, via Internet. The European digital library will see rapid expansion, with a view to offering far more digital objects by 2010 than the 6 million initially planned, given the increasing number of institutions which have agreed to make their “digitalised heritage” available via the library. There remain two key questions to be resolved: the funding of the digitalisation and solutions to make works protected under copyright accessible via the European digital library. For more information, see: http: //ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/. (I.L.)