Want to browse the British Library without leaving your chair? Or read Dante’s Divine Comedy without rooting for it in a second-hand store? The free online cultural library Europeana goes live as a “prototype” version today and is designed to put two million of Europe’s culturally important works in one place, as well as films, audio, photos, paintings, newspapers and manuscripts (via AFP). The project is funded by the European Union through its eContentplus scheme and with no small expense: the Eurozone is officially in recession, but the EU is spending about €2.5 million (£1.97 million) a year on the project and employing 14 full-time staff – and it won’t be fully operational until 2010, when it will have ten million items.

Europeana illustrates a real problem for libraries in the digital age: it claims that only one percent of books in the EU’s public libraries have been digitised, which will grow to four percent by 2012. Set up in 2007 as a response to Google’s Book Search project – which claims seven million books – Europeana knows it has its work cut out. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) also thought an online book library was a good idea, but abandoned its digitisation project after 18 months after getting through 750,000 titles. And think of the languages: the project will deal with 21 different tongues, forcing Brussels to invest €40 million (£30.5 million) into automatic translation tools, on the top of the €120 million (£94.5 million) it’s putting in to develop digitisation technology in 2009 and 2010. So the bill for the for a pan-European online library is €145 million (£114 million) of public money over two years – it’s no surprise the project is hoping that private investors will take off some of the burden.