The European Commission has recently published an update on its digitisation efforts. Some of the highlights:

• Europeana now contains more than 23 million records from more than 2200 institutions;
• Among some of the recent improvements is a dedicated, digital collection of artefacts from the first world war;
• To make it easier to search its database and add new collections, Europeana is developing a tool to automatically convert metadata from different sources into a standardised format.
• In addition to that, the Commission is supporting the development of technologies to ‘enhance the meaning and experiences from digital cultural’, some of which sound like they come straight out of a science fiction movie:
  • a see-through display to overlay images with digital information that can be controlled by hand gestures;
  • tools to allow personal interactions with artefacts at cultural sites using mobile phones;
  • a software to contextualise historical texts and make them accesible to different audiences;
  • a 3D engine using maps, satellite images and photographer to reproduce fully virtual reproductions of towns and cities;
  • 3D capturing tools to make more realistic digital reproductions of statues and other three-dimensional artefacts