The Conference of European National Librarians has voted overwhelmingly to support the open licensing of their data.

What does that mean in practice?

Datasets describing the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe - the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication - will be accessible for anybody to re-use for any purpose. And because so much material has been digitised, this full text material will become openly available as well. This means everything from the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France ...

According to the press release:

^{The potential to create new relationships between datasets from Europe's greatest libraries creates what an expert in Semantic Web technology, Dr Stefan Gradmann, Professor of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, has called a 'knowledge-generating engine'.}

^{The first outcome of the open licence agreement is that the metadata provided by national libraries to Europeana.eu, Europe's digital library, museum and archive ... will have a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication, or CC0 licence. This metadata relates to millions of digitised texts and images coming into Europeana from others Google's mass digitisations of books in the national libraries of the Netherlands and Austria.}

Europeana brings together the digitised content of Europe's libraries, galleries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 20 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 27 European languages.