A just-issued report from the European Commission on its Europeana digital library project encourages member states to go head-to-head with Google Books by digitizing their own national libraries and archives themselves, and by placing a seven-year limit on any contract with Google in anticipation of more developed competition in the future.

The report (pdf) says the alternative is a “digital Dark Age.”

As a story in the Guardian by Benedicte Page summarizes it,

The report, the work of German national library head Elisabeth Niggeman, advertising chief Maurice Levy and Belgian author Jacques de Decker, recommends much greater focus on the EU’s online library Europeana and the fostering of competitors to Google, which currently dominates the digitisation agenda. “Can Europe afford to be inactive and wait, or leave it to one or more private players to digitise our common cultural heritage? Our answer is a resounding ‘no’,” the trio say.

Specifically, the report recommends that Google’s exclusivity agreements on the material it has digitised from the EU’s libraries be brought down from the current 15 years to just seven years. Despite the anxiety over Google, the report adds that “we strongly encourage the idea of bringing more private investments and companies into the digitisation arena through a fair and balanced partnership” with the public sector.

The recommendation may have been somewhat less than a surprise — after all, the EU has invested in Europeana, and it shows some different thinking about what a digital library is. As a report in PCWorld details,

Europeana is the E.U.’s digital library and currently offers free access to more than 15 million digitized books, maps, newspapers, paintings, photographs and other artifacts. This puts it in competition with Google Books, which also estimates that it has digitized 15 million books. The main area of concern for Europeana is in so-called “orphan works” material whose potential right-holders are unknown or books that are out of print.

Monday’s report recommended that although it is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitize out-of-print works and exploit them, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitize material and make it available to the public, for which right-holders should be remunerated.

Beyond the question of orphan books, as a Deutsche Welle report clarifies, Google Books demands a form of exclusivity for 15 years that Europeana does not. As the report explains,

Although Europeana and Google Books share the same aim in that respect, their paths diverge on the more controversial issue of preferential use.

While public domain books accessed through the former can be reused, exported or integrated into the users own library, those digitized by Google are less of a free lunch.

“The deal they sign with the organization for whom they are digitizing gives them exclusive rights for 15 years,” [Europeana’s Jonathan] Purday said, adding that under such contracts only Google and the owner of the material will be allowed to display it.

“Their material leaves the public domain,” he added.

As for how the seven year contract would work, a New York Times report explains, “During a period of preferential use, a public domain book, for instance, that was digitized by Google would be available only through a library’s Web site, through Google’s Web site, or through noncommercial Web sites for that seven-year period.”

The key idea, says the Deutsche Welle report, is to give Google “a run for its money.”