How is Europeana growing from 2 million when it was launched last year to 10 million items in 2010?
At present less than 1.5% of items in Europe’s national libraries are digitised, and other cultural institutions also have a long way to go. The main priority for expanding Europeana is therefore funding digitisation to provide more content. This is a responsibility of the EU countries, several of whom use money from the EU structural funds for specific digitisation projects (for example, Slovakia has rehabilitated an old military complex as a large-scale digitisation facility using page turning robots). Through the eContentplus programme – and from 2009 the Competitiveness and Innovation programme – the Commission co-funds some digitisation activities, selected on the basis of their cross-border relevance and their contribution to Europeana. In August 2008, the Commission asked EU countries to step up their efforts to contribute to Europeana, especially by providing more funding to digitisation and putting clearer figures on how much material they would digitise ( IP/08/1255 ). The Co
