The European Library

» see theeuropeanlibrary.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The European Library launched on 17 March 2005 and did something that sounds simple until you try it. You typed one query and it searched the catalogs of Europe's national libraries at once. Forty-nine of them took part. At its largest the index covered more than 200 million records in 35 languages, including 24 million pages of full text and over seven million digital objects.

It was not a company. The Conference of European National Librarians owned it, funded it by subscription from the member libraries, and ran the office out of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. That structure explains both what it achieved and how it died. No commercial search engine has ever persuaded forty-nine national institutions to expose their catalogs through a single interface, because no commercial search engine can offer them the one thing a librarians' consortium can, which is the promise that the thing is theirs.

My university years ran from roughly 2003 to 2010, which is exactly the window this was alive and useful. The library search that mattered to me then was the one my own university ran, and after that it was whatever Google Scholar would return. A federated catalog of European national libraries is the kind of infrastructure you only meet if your work sends you into it, and mine did not. So this is written from outside, about a service built for a serious and specific purpose and closed by a vote rather than by failure.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The immediate effect was on Europeana, which is the better-known project and the one that outlived it. Europeana launched in 2008 as a European Commission initiative to gather digitized cultural material from libraries and museums in one place, and The European Library provided the organizational scaffolding to get it started. For years afterward TEL was Europeana's single largest content supplier, which means the parent project ended up as the child's main feed.

~ what got buried with it ~

CENL decided at its 2015 general meeting in Bern that the members would stop contributing to the collective subscription. A review of alternative service models followed and recommended winding the service down by the end of the following year, so the content was frozen on 31 December 2016. The portal stayed up in maintenance mode until 2019, which is a courtesy most dead services never get, and then the domain went dark.

What went with it was the union catalog as an idea. Europeana holds the digital objects and holds them well, but a union catalog of national library holdings is a different instrument. It tells you what exists and where it physically is, including the material nobody has digitized and nobody is going to. That layer is now spread back across forty-nine separate search boxes, which is where it sat in 2004.

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