The European Library provides a central gateway to access the online catalogues and digital collections of Europe’s national libraries.

This means you can:

• Search in the collections of up to 37 national libraries at once and get results from all over Europe – you can also choose which language you would like The European Library website in.


• Check if your item is online: who better to ask than Europe's national libraries?!


• Find the physical location of your item if it is not digitally available, and get direct access to the 'delivery' services offered by the national libraries


• Access from the search results the online availability resources beyond The European Library: online bookshops to purchase the selected item, search engines to investigate further, etc.

You can also explore the digital collections and catalogues of Europe's national libraries. This is very easy. Take a look under the "collections" button and be amazed by the diversity of material you can find.

Did you know that you can also get information about each separate national library?

After registration you can get more personalised services. For instance, you can save your search history or download your search results to your own reference manager. Registration is free. Would you like to know more? Click here http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/user_registration.html

• First time visitors can view The European Library User Guide in 22 languages; English but also Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijany, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. The User Guide is designed to help new visitors discover all search possibilities offered by The European Library portal.



• Alternatively download The European Library 1st time user guide (English only) or see the Video Tutorial


• Or download The European Library brochure in English or in Spanish .

Being the nerve-centre of Europe’s library world, The European Library network likes to share the technical developments with other experts and be open about the web-standards that it uses.

Click here to access Supported Browsers and Operating Systems information  

For a quick and easy introduction to the architecture of The European Library, please see the power-point presentation , created by one of our developers, "Eric van der Meulen".

The European Library Handbook is a guide to help national libraries to input their collections into The European Library portal. Furthermore it assists partner-libraries in ensuring that their collections comply with the specific standards implemented by The European Library portal. Although the tutorial is primarily intended for (future) partners of The European Library, you can access parts of the handbook and explore our Metadata Registry!

Would you like The European Library on your own site?

Install The European Library mini searchbox and you will have a unique service to offer. It’s free and very easy.

Via The European Library searchbox your visitors can always check if a particular item has been digitised. It gives access to all the functionalities of The European Library. Guide the visitors of your website to great material – books but also photos, maps, images, music scores, paintings, films, etc. Quality and reliability are guaranteed because all content has been selected and categorised by Europe’s national librarians.

Learn how to install a mini library on your site  

The European Library provides carefully selected links to other web-resources, whose content we feel that users of The European Library would be interested in. See our Links page for further information, or provide a link to your own website by joining our linking programme.

The European Librarys Media Centre provides information to help you keep you up-to-date with Europe's digital library world. Next to information about The European (Digital) Library, it also presents press releases from or articles and presentations about Europe’s national libraries.

The European Library is constantly in development, and is getting bigger. Subscribe to The European Library Newsletter to receive regular updates. Subscription is free.

Comments on The European Library? Mail us at info@TheEuropeanLibrary.org or use our Feedback form.