Manuscripts, books, photo, maps and masterpieces of European painting will be available on the Europeana online library, which will be officially inaugurated on Thursday in Brussels. To begin with, Europeana will house two million sites that testify to the richness and diversity of Europe's cultural heritage. There will be, among others: collection 500 works of Picasso, “Divine Comedy” Dante, English “Great Charter of Freedoms”, Mozart manuscripts, Beethoven and Chopin, film tapes documenting the most important events of the 20th century: from the Battle of Verdun to the fall of the Berlin Wall… In the collection, which is to be constantly enlarged, there will also be more unexpected harvests: np. recordings 500 languages and dialects from the collections of the British Library, folk songs from Slovenia from the years 1920-50, or the Finnish collection of advertisements and posters – testimony to the birth and development of the era of mass consumption. They are works that are not protected by copyright – to avoid paying their owners, for modern publications. A total of 1,000 institutions were involved in the project: library, museums and archives z 27 member countries (from Poland – National Library). All the collections made available by them will be available in a digital version for free from anywhere in the world thanks to the Internet. “A Czech student will be able to browse the works of the British Library without going to London, Irish art lover will be able to admire the Mona Lisa, skipping the lines to the Louvre” – said the EU commissioner for. Viviane Reding's information society, która w czwartek dokona inauguracji strony http://www.europeana.eu
