It has become a strategic question to put digital copies of European, and within it Hungarian, cultural herritage to the Internet. The reason is that this kind of knowledge is absolutely necessary for the retaining of innovative skill, and after all, of the European people?s competitiveness in the labour market. The European cultural variety can only be preserved through a Europeana with a balanced content, even if 70% of users chose English interface (beside French, German, Polish[1] and Russian) according to this year?s statistics of the Europeana site. Although English is the mediator, the content of the digital library cannot be solely in English or in any other language. Balance in content means also that the European Digital Library reflects documents published on other data carriers, so there is no selection in this sense.

1. The lack of selection entails the admission of extremities without any censure. Non-extreme contents (in a scholarly, political or moral sense) represent a counterbalance, so that we don?t have to be apprehensive of an exaggerated influence of the formers.
2. A content without selection protects intellectual property. The big quantity of digital material put on the Internet helps to eliminate the possibility to ?discover? issues that already have been described many times. Beside that it also documents such parallel discoveries and plagiarisms occured in the course of history.
3. The digital content without selection eliminates anachronism, and by that weakens falsifier political intentions. None of the representatives of national cultures can make false statements or create glorious natural history, more glorious than it was in reality.

Libraries play a key role in the creation of future?s Europeana or World Digital Library. They are keeping and preserving the entirity of cultural herritage. The basis of their cooperation is a standard(ised) world, and their staff is prepared for the description of the preserved documents? metadates, for the digitisation of document stocks along priorities (but not giving up the demand on completeness). National libraries in broader sense can come to existence through the cooperation and fellowship of libraries, so that national library tasks could be performed by a large number of cooperating libraries, and these ?national libraries? could, through international projects, accomplish the aims of EDL and WDL.

Libraries can however hardly enforce their interests. That is why technological innovation can give the impression to decision makers that the dinamically changing ?model world? and the existence of a large number of digital libraries is enough. Almost all of the various (regarding technical issues and proprietary rights) digital libraries are financed from public sources ? either right from the very start or from later on. This solution involves the risk that the civil publicity of culture arisen in the 19^th century becomes endangered. The history of the past 100 years showed us the cynicism of democracy: although everyone is legally equal ? this equality remains only a legal possibility (also in the field of having access to health, schools or cultural goods). And that is insufficient.