The Royal Library dates back to the national library founded by Frederic III in 1648 and Copenhagen University Library established in 1482. The Royal Library's function is not limited to that of a library, having several museums under its control, such as the National Museum for Books and Printing, the National Museum of Photography, the Danish Museum of Cartoons, and the Danish Folklore Archives. The library has four buildings, and the newest is known as the "Black Diamond." This new building was built for rationalizing and modernizing public services, administration of collection and other operations as well as for preserving the collections for a long term. In addition, it is the essential concept for the Royal Library, as a cultural institution, to make its collection more accessible to a larger number of people for use as well as experience. Just like Richard Strauss, who said in 1913 that he was the greatest composer of the second greatest, I would like to represent our library as the biggest in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

The Black Diamond holds about 30 million items, of which about 500,000 have been digitized. Since July 2005, we have had the legal right to harvest all Danish websites, and 130 TB of materials are now included in our archive.

We have been holding a variety of events such as exhibition concerts, lectures and interview sessions inviting authors, a cultural club for students, with an aim to show our cultural heritage also to people who would not visit a classical library.

Now I will talk about our portal site, "Pearls of Culture." Three years ago, I had a strange experience. I wanted to find the digitized version of a published state committee's report, but I could not find it on the website of the administrative library. You could find in the catalog a report whose title you knew, but there was no information about the digitization project and its perspective and contents, so you could not find which materials were available in digital form. I realized we had to do something.

While all kinds of institutions have been digitizing many kinds of materials, it is almost impossible to get an overview of the digitization situation in a country or in a particular sector. To improve the situation, in April 2009, the Royal Library announced a new service "Pearls of Culture" to describe and register the whole digital heritage of Denmark.

In 2006, the Ministry of Culture set up a national committee to investigate the whole digitization situation in Denmark so as to develop a policy, and a final report was published in April 2009. Actually, it was extremely difficult to get a precise overview, and that is why the Royal Library decided to map the whole area first for the commission, and later on for the general public. A web portal was established to show what had been digitized so far, by which institutions or publishers, comprising what types of materials on what subjects. We found that the French Ministry of Culture had had the same idea.

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At first it was not possible to create a database because we did not have metadata, so we only included descriptions of digital resources at the collection level. We wanted to target user groups beyond the traditional library users, but to include politicians, administrators and others as well as researchers, teachers, students, and anyone who needed information. Therefore, Pearls of Culture is structured to give an overview of the digital collection from different angles: institutions, materials, and subjects as basic classifications and for search.

The subject areas are organized hierarchically with main subjects and subdivisions. The e-collection record contains description of contents such as name of responsible institution, type of material, size of collection, presentation and preservation formats, date of digitization, right of use, etc. We have many types of materials, for example, a collection of Hans Christian Andersen in many foreign languages, an archive of the philosopher Sen Aabye Kierkegaard which covers all his works including manuscripts, printed and non-printed works.

Launched a little less than one year ago, Pearls of Culture has 200 e-collections at present and 30 new collections have been added since its opening.

For the future, we are planning several developments for the portal: full translation of the website into English in 2010; and development of a search tool for searching individual items of all the digitized collections when metadata are provided. In addition, we have to decide as a policy whether to include "digitally born" materials. Our relationship to Europeana is also on the agenda, in which it will be necessary to work as a prioritization tool for selection and to decide which digitized materials to be uploaded to this European aggregator.

If the Royal Library had not decided to start and do it all by itself instead of setting up a cross-sector planning group of all the parties, the creation of the portal would have required enormous efforts. It might have been natural for a library to take charge of standardization of description, cataloging, and domestic and international cooperation. The project started less than one year ago, but the cooperation among the institutions including museums, libraries and archives has been going according to plan.

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I will introduce to you Europeana, as museum-library-audiovisual-archives collaboration across the 27 European countries of the EU. I will talk about its potential and strengths, as well as its vision, the governance model which facilitates collaboration, how it is funded, and future issues. To show the scope of Europeana, I will demonstrate the site using the example of Art Nouveau, a European artistic movement from the 1890s to World War I, with roots in Japanese Art. When you search Europeana using the term "Art Nouveau," you can find digital versions of artistic works, posters, costumes for theater, as well as digitized books, films about Ecole de Nancy, home of many Art Nouveau artists etc.

Art Nouveau was a comprehensive artistic style and we can see many examples from several countries, such as France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Scotland. In Europeana a search can be made across over 2,000 cultural heritage institutions in Europe retrieving the wide variety of types of materials these institutions hold, such as paintings, photos, videos, sound recordings, manuscripts, letters or books.

The prototype of Europeana now makes accessible nearly 6 million digital items, increasing to 10 million in July 2010 when it becomes fully operational, and we expect it to reach 25 million within a couple of years. About 15,000 people use the site daily. We have not yet done any marketing, so this is a result of press releases from the European Commission and events hosted by some contributors. Seeing this, we could say its not doing badly, or if we put an American positive slant on it we would say it is doing pretty well!

So we have seen the strengths, what are Europeana's weaknesses, opportunities and threats? How are these reflected in its vision, governance, barriers and funding? As the European Union Vision of 2006 to give multilingual access to European Digital Cultural Heritage has been partly achieved, we are now looking at the opportunity represented by web2.0, the semantic web. Therefore, our vision for 2011 is to be many more things: aggregator, distributor, catalyst, innovator, facilitator, and revenue generator.

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Being an aggregator of aggregators means that we can make use of the national portals of each country and the vertical subject portals and pull them together in Europeana creating a single search and browse interface. The concept of aggregating the aggregators also helps in creating a sustainable business model where we do not create a large central office, but make use of the already aggregated materials. As a distributor, we hold Europeana institutes metadata in Europeana for reuse in different ways for different audiences: so for example, people can extract from Europeana what they need to create their own website or exhibition on subjects such as Art Nouveau. Or an education site might wish to create a learning set on Leonardo da Vinci, or Descartes or the Cold War, using the materials of Europeana. Being a catalyst, it contributes to the generation of a new tool or new service, for example, mobile phones used in a museum for information on exhibited items. As an innovator, we expect to get back new applications from other sites using our technology because it is an open source which is available to everybody. We will be a facilitator, preparing authority files and online dictionaries for cross-European multilingual search and retrieval, and also helping content providers in copyright and license issues. Lastly, it is also important to become a revenue generator so that we create a sustainable service for the future and to this end we are working on the creation of services to do so.

Now I will talk about the governance of the Europeana Foundation, which is behind Europeana. In many countries, museums, libraries, archives, and audiovisual collections existed as separate entities although some countries have started to create cross domain portals. This meant it would require talking to thousands of institutions, so in order to make use of the multiplier effect we decided to ask the pan-European associations of each area to be members of the Europeana Foundation, as most of the individual institutions are members of those European associations. For example, most of the libraries belong to CENL, LIBER, or CERL.

To participate in EU projects funding has to be found to match the money given in these projects. To do this the Europeana Foundation raised 1.4 million euros from the ministries of culture and education from several countries in the European Union. The Foundation is made up of three layers, Executive Committee, Board of Participants and Council of Content Providers and Aggregators, and the last one is to ensure that if people are interested they are able to participate at an individual level.

We have some barriers, including the lack of an EU-wide copyright law, public domain ignorance, the need to generate revenue to operate, and others.

Lastly we can see the Europeana project universe at the center of which there are Europeana v.1.0 and Europeana Connect, surrounded by 15 other contributing projects and a couple of related projects. This is how a large percentage of content and technology is delivered to Europeana.

We are part way to our vision, and I hope we will continue to move in the right direction. It needs a lot of hard work but it is also a lot of fun, thanks to the huge amount of willingness and volunteer work.

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Dr. Nagao: Why is the MLA collaboration not working very well in Japan while progress can be seen in Europe?

Prof. Takubo: I think that is because European countries have set national policies. In Denmark, the Ministry of Culture took action and a commission for policy making of digitization has been set up. I suppose Europeana also has been backed up by a policy for the whole Europe to promote MLA collaboration and digitization of information resources.

Dr. Nagao: Could you elaborate the situation in Denmark about a national policy?

Mr. Kolding Nielsen: For many years, the heads of each MLA sector, including National Librarians and National Archivists, have had meetings to discuss how to cooperate with each other and to plan and set up policies. There is a national commission for the protection of national assets, consisting of four institutions. And a national committee for MLA (or ALM) was established in 2000, and we made an agreement to cooperate in the digitization, policy planning and direction of each sector. The activities under the committee are recognized by the Ministry of Culture and the government.

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Dr. Nagao: How about policies concerning Europeana in the European Union?

Dr. Cousins: Actually it was the European Union itself which wanted such a portal as a means of combating the Anglo-centric nature of the web. First, this was because the EU wanted to be seen to be working together for a common aim. Another reason was to be able to access information easily no matter where it comes from and to ensure that our cultural institutions maintain a relevance for the next generation. The policy of the EU is to ensure institutions remain relevant to users in the digital age, and providing of the funding to achieve this is really fundamental. For Europeana, we had a small budget at the beginning, but getting people together, creating tools to access content, organizing meetings for the preparation metadata and technology, created the flagship for us to move forward.

Dr. Nagao: I think among European countries there might be differences in willingness as well as technical methods, such as creation of metadata and systems. How do you try to integrate them?

Dr. Cousins: Indeed there are differences from country to country. Our approach is to celebrate this diversity. For metadata, for example, we map data of different standards into one schema for display purposes. We try to keep barriers low for any contributors and create the basics that allow us to proceed.

Dr. Nagao: That is admirable progress against the odds. How about the case in Japan?

Prof. Takubo: I am afraid I have to say that Japan is still behind these examples, judging from the numbers of museums having a proper catalog of their own collections and the progress of digitization itself.

Dr. Nagao: How do you cope with the copyright issue and how are MLA collaboration and the digital library being influenced by the issue?

Mr. Kolding Nielsen: The copyright issue is a major barrier for mass digitization to cover the big black hole of 20th century materials. In the Nordic countries, from the beginning of the digital age, we got the right to digitize by agreement for handicapped people, from which came the notion of "collective licensing." Extending this principle, since last year, under the law, it is possible to make an agreement with the organizations on behalf of the copyright holders. Thus, what should be decided now is how much fee should be paid to the rights holders. After the Second World War, the governments of the Nordic countries decided that a certain amount should be paid to all living authors whose books are held by public libraries. This system will be useful also for the digitization.

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Dr. Nagao: What is the situation about the copyright issue in Europe?

Dr. Cousins: Basically, our aim is to make the materials accessible, and users may therefore have to pay for in copyright. On the other hand, European countries have to find a solution, such as the collective licensing one for Nordic countries, so that material may be digitized in the first place and to solve the issue that the same piece of material may have different copyrights attached to it in different countries.

Dr. Nagao: Do you have any specific target for users, for example, for students for the sake of education? Or would you keep it for the general audience?

Dr. Cousins: Europeana targets at present the general public who need information. I think the most important thing is to continue to make cultural heritage content available, so that the users can extract what they need from our content. For example, a company making educational software can obtain information from several countries on a particular theme to provide them in a package of software to educational institutions.

Dr. Nagao: What mechanism does the Europeana have to decide your policy about what kind of data to collect and for what kind of user group do you focus?

Dr. Cousins: There is no policy in place at the moment but we do analyse what users are looking for and will start to feed that into a more coherent content strategy. We focus on a few types of user ranging from the hobbyist to the school child trying to do their homework.

Mr. Kolding Nielsen: I think we have to think about why Europeana has seen such success, with the cooperation of 45 countries in which at least 40 different languages are spoken. There is a long and strong tradition of cooperation in Europe, especially in the library sector. Cooperation at the institutional level has not been so solid in the museum sector and archives sector, so the national libraries and research libraries have been the driving force for the foundation and development of Europeana.

Dr. Nagao: In Japan, what should be our direction?

Prof. Takubo: The situation is different in Japan from Denmark; however, I think that libraries should play a leading role in making a cooperative organization and forming a basis for cooperation, paying attention so that the three sectors can work in a good balance.

Dr. Nagao: Thank you very much. To enhance the MLA collaboration for the sake of people, we would like to continue active exchange of opinions among museums, libraries and archives in Japan.

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