The EuDML Project

The European Digital Library (EuDML) was a project partly funded by the European Commission in the  EC Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, Information and Communication Technology Policy Support Programme, in the period from 1 February 2010 to 31 January 2013.

The EuDML project was explicitly envisioned as a pilot project addressing two challenges that prevented previous attempts towards a global digital mathematics library based on a top-down approach to succeed:

  1. Setting up the technical infrastructure to create a unified access point for the digital mathematical content hosted by a number of different organizations across various countries;
  2. Defining a cooperation model with a variety of stakeholders that would allow building a reliable global reference library meant to run over the long term, and to be eventually exhaustive.

During the three years of the project, these two goals have been pursued in parallel with stubbornness. On both sides the project reached clear successes and modified the state-of-the-art. The basic infrastructure is up and running, with a critical mass in content. A number of possible partners have declared interest in the initiative. However a lot remains to be done in order to secure these results and set the basis of a strong and inclusive infrastructure. A general overview of the project and its outcome is described in the paper Reviving the Free Public Scientific Library in the Digital Age? The EuDML project by Thierry Bouche.

The EuDML has been built by the consortium of 16 partners from 8 European countries, which comprised a variety of stakeholders and expertise. Development of the project and numerous partial achievements are documented in the series of publicly accessible deliverables and tools.