EU Document Digitization Project

by Phil Wilkin (pwilkin@pitt.edu)

From the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 until the present, the institutions of what is now known as the European Union have published “government document” materials on all phases of their institutional and policy activities. The total produced so far includes well over 20,000,000 pages. The Office of Official Publications of the European Communities (OPOCE) recently announced a project to digitize nearly all of this historic collection. This article, after placing this project within the historical context of EU publishing, describes the project.

From the early 1950s, EU materials were deposited in libraries throughout the world, the largest collections being in Europe^[1] and North America ^[2] In the mid-1990s, the EU began placing increasingly larger portions of its published materials on its website “Europa: Gateway to the European Union”. As more and more EU materials were placed online, the amount of material in paper and fiche format sent to depository libraries decreased dramatically.

Until EU materials began appearing on “Europa,” patron access to them was often very limited because of two major factors. First, there has never been a comprehensive catalog of EU materials available to the public. Systematic cataloging of EU materials in OCLC did not begin until the late 1990s, and that cataloging was not retrospective; so there was no easy way for patrons to determine what the EU had published. Second, even if patrons knew of EU materials, they had to either travel to a depository library or depend on Inter-Library Loan.

The current project will eliminate these significant barriers. A description says that the project “…will make the complete collection of European Union archived publications freely accessible online…” ^[3] The EU has historically published two main types of materials, commonly referred to as publications and documents. Publications, which normally contain a full title page and verso and which are often similar in format to commercial publications, have been published by the OPOCE. Publications most commonly have institutional authorship, but a sizeable portion has individual authors. The current digitization project includes nearly all of this type of material. Documents, on the other hand, are often “internal” or working documents, averaging about 40 pages, published by individual EU institutions. These were never deposited with the OPOCE, and extant copies will likely be found in the libraries of individual EU institutions. It is unclear how many of these will be tracked down and digitized.

The EU Bookshop will make all these digitized documents freely available through a single interface, which will provide full-text searching capability. In addition, the collection will be connected to, and a part of, the European Digital Library. The project will have enormous significance for scholarship pertaining to EU studies, particularly for earlier, “pre-Internet” materials.

References

1. ↑ See European Documentation Centres.
2. ↑ See EU depository libraries in North America.
3. ↑ Source: Newsletter of the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1/2008, p. 1.

WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Fall 2008 > EU Document Digitization Project