ENRICH

Status: in progress

ENRICH - European Networking Resources and Information concerning Cultural Heritage Home.
 
A project of twenty major European heritage institutions with the objective of concentrating accessible digitised material in order to create the most outstanding digital library in Europe in the sphere of historical resources on the Manuscriptorium platform.

In Prague on 3.12. 2007 an introductory meeting was held to inaugurate a two-year international ENRICH project financed by the European eContentPlus programme. Its objective is to provide seamless access to scattered digitised collections of historical documents from the holdings of European cultural institutions and to create a shared virtual research environment, in particular for the study of manuscripts, but also incunabula, scarce printed books and other historical documents. The implementation of the project is based on the existing Manuscriptorium digital library, which currently brings together data derived from 46 collections located in the Czech Republic and abroad.

The ENRICH project consortium consists of 18 partners, but the project is supported by a number of further institutions including owners of extensive digital archives. The ENRICH project partners hold in their collections almost 85% of the existing digitised manuscripts from European national libraries.

The co-ordinator of the project is the National Library of the Czech Republic jointly with two further Czech partners, AIP Beroun s.r.o. and Cross Czech a.s. The first two of these are simultaneously “workpackage” leaders, jointly with Oxford University Computing Services, Università degli Studi di Firenze - Centro per la comunicazione e l’integrazione dei media, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in Vilnius, SYSTRAN Paris and the National Library of Spain. Other project partners are Københavns Universitet - Nordisk Foskningsinstitut, the National Library of Italy in Florence, Vilnius University Library, Wrocław University Library, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum in Reykjavík, Computer Science for the Humanities – Cologne University, St. Pölten Diocese Archive (Monasterium project, Austria), the National Library of Iceland, Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre.