The European Union has finally opened its digital online library, Europeana, to the public, allowing users everywhere free access to the rich archives of EU's 27 member states. The library includes more than 2 million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings, and films from national libraries and cultural institutions, all of which have been digitally encoded and uploaded to Europeana. And that's just the beginning; the EU plans to continue adding content over the next several years.

"Europeana offers a journey through time, across borders, and into new ideas of what our culture is. More than that, it will connect people to their history and, through interactive pages and tools, to each other," EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding said in a statement. "I now call on Europe's cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form. We should make Europeana a home for interactive creative participation at the fingertips of people who want to mould their own piece of European culture and share it with others."

Needless to say, Europeana has gotten quite the reception upon its launch. The site was initially overwhelmed by more than 10 million hits per hour, which temporarily took down the server. (As of publication time, the server still appears to be moving quite slowly.) "It shows the huge interest of European users in this project," a spokesperson told Reuters.

Right now, Europeana mainly offers content that is public domain, which should allow it to avoid the same type of copyright issues that Google faced when trying to let users browse works online. At the same time, however, the European Commission said that it's in talks with rights holders to work out a way to add copyrighted materials to the online archive.

The EU's objective is to have more than 10 million works available through Europeana by 2010, and it hopes to achieve that growth by funding Europeana to the tune of €2 million per year between 2009 and 2011. Now, get to browsing! We hear that the Louvre has some lovely offerings online, for those of you who can't quite make it to Paris this time of year.