The Google news release also contains a comment about Europeana, a European Commission project to digitize cultural materials from around Europe. For those interested, this page lists the organizations participating in the Europeana program. According to their web site, they have six million items (images, texts, books, sounds, videos) digitized so far.
In addition to Europeana there is also the European Library Material in this database comes from National Libraries throughout Europe.
On the topic of other digitization in Europe, the Google Blog notes:
Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.
Stay tuned. It will also be interesting to see what other digital library projects ask for access to the scanned content.
2) The other news from Google is about Google Maps. Beginning today, biking directions are available. The company says this has been a very frequent request of users. You'll also find over 12,000 miles of bike trail info (from selected third parties including the Rails to Trails Conservancy that is also visible on maps. This second post is very interesting. It discusses many variables and other factors that go into creating a bike routing program.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
