While initiatives at various levels of United States government strive to put current documents and publications online for public consumption, the European Union has been keeping up with new documents and scanning its archives to boot.

As a result, the EU Bookshop opened its Digital Library last week, an online repository of more than 110,000 scanned historical EU documents which date all the way back to 1952.

A program launched by the EU Publications Office in 2007 let users request scans of out-of-print documents, and the program was so popular the Office went ahead with its next stage. Between February 2008 and September 2009, the Publications Office scanned some 12 million pages, and at its highest output was doing 1.4 million pages per month.

The project reportedly cost about €2.5 million.

Now, the fruits of this effort have been officially opened to the European public, with content in about 50 languages, which represents more than 370 corporate EU institutional authors.

These publications have been scanned into .PDF format, and can be accessed through the EU Bookshop's search page. When entering search terms, a check box labeled "Digital Library (Archive)" lets the user query the new archive.