ProQuest has embarked on a European-wide project, Early European Books, which will trace the history of printing in Europe from its origins to 1700.

Early European Books will be issued as a series of collections, each offering access to the early printed books of one or more major libraries. Its scope will encompass all works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, together with any works in European languages printed further afield.

Early European Books provides:

• Full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources
• Each item captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts, providing scholars with a wealth of information about the physical characteristics and provenance histories of the original artefacts
• Detailed cataloguing, including standardization of variant author, city and printer names, thanks to a partnership with the CERL Thesaurus (www.cerl.org)
• A thumbnail view which allows scanning the contents of the entire volume
• Images displayed in a Flash viewer, allowing the user to zoom, pan and rotate the image
• Searching for books, or specific pages, that feature illuminated lettering, marginalia, maps, portraits or other graphic features

Early European Books currently comprises:

• Collection One: Over 2,500 volumes from the Danish Royal Library’s National Collection including texts that profoundly influenced pan-European intellectual life
• Collection Two: More than 3,000 volumes from the National Central Library of Florence, including works of the major humanists and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, together with the almost complete output of the Aldine Press, which played a crucial role in the development of early European printing
• Collection Three: When completed in 2012, this will contain an estimated 15-20,000 volumes from four libraries, encompassing all major European languages and regions and including essential primary sources for the study of history, religion, science, literature, philosophy, art and music from the period, together with influential editions of classical and medieval authors and extremely rare examples of the art of early printing. Contains books digitized at the National Central Library of Florence, The National Library of the Netherlands, The Wellcome Library (London) and the Danish Royal Library.