EuropeanaTravel is a new EU-funded project that will channel digital content from Europe’s national and university libraries into Europeana.eu. Starting on May 1st and running for 2 years, EuropeanaTravel will digitise over a million resources, including maps, manuscripts, photos, films, books and postcards on the themes of travel, tourism, trade routes and exploration.

Latvia in EuropeanaTravel is represented by the National Library of Latvia with digital collection of maps (~ 200) and books about traveling and tourism (5000 pages). Roads have fundamental role in traveling. They link far and near populated places, provinces and metropoleis, countries and people. The collection will reveal the development of traffic ways from 18 up to 21 century and the history of tourism mapping in Latvia. The book collection will include travel reports and essays and first tourist guidebooks printed in Latvia in the second half of the 19 century till year 1940. The collection will give the insight in social and cultural life of Latvia during that time.

EuropeanaTravel will digitise rich collections from many well known national and research libraries in Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden and the UK.

The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said ‘Travelling is education’ and hitched the post coach to Italy, the land ‘where the lemon trees flower’. Today’s digital nomads can hitch the sophisticated search engine of Europeana and explore faraway places through the eyes of early travellers. EuropeanaTravel adds a new dimension to planning trips for education, business, social networking or holidays.

As pressure grows on the world’s wildernesses, and air travel and mass tourism threaten the environment and the ecology of unspoilt places, the origins and impacts of travel and tourism become a focus of study and a unique record of places before the modern world intruded. EuropeanaTravel also shows that economic migration is not a new phenomenon – ancient trade routes and population movements will all be tracked in the project.

Welcoming the launch of the new project, Dr. Jill Cousins, director of the Europeana office in the Royal Library in the Netherlands, said, ‘this resource will be of value to school teachers and students, to travellers and holidaymakers. Many people nowadays travel many miles in their lifetimes; most of our forefathers hardly left their village. EuropeanaTravel will allow us to document how this great change took place’.

Note for editors
Europeana.eu is a portal that links to nearly 5 million digital resources from the museums, archives, libraries and audiovisual collections of Europe. It was launched in November 2008 by the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and attracted millions of hits.

EuropeanaTravel is one of a group of projects funded by the European Commission’s eContentplus programme, that are digitising material from cultural heritage institutions to feed into Europeana. Other projects include the European Film Gateway (www.europeanfilmgateway.eu), capturing the rich European cinema heritage, and EuropeanaLocal (www.europeanalocal.eu), opening up resources held in local archives and museums.

The Conference of European National Libraries CENL www.cenl.org and LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) www.libereurope.eu support this project. CENL includes 48 national libraries from 46 European countries. LIBER includes almost 400 research libraries in more than 40 countries.

EuropeanaTravel is coordinated by the National Library of Estonia.

For further information please contact:
Toomas Schvak, National Library of Estonia
Tel +372 630 7437
Email toomas.schvak@nlib.ee

For further information in Latvia please contact:
Ilze Egle, National Library of Latvia
Tel +371 6736 5255
Email: ilze.egle@lnb.lv