 I'm Paul Eris, I'm President of Libre, the Association of European Research Libraries, and I'm here in Amsterdam at a partners meeting for a new project we're developing on open access publishing. But what I want to talk about today is about open access, but it's a different project, a related project, to the one we've been discussing here in the capital. Europeana Newspapers is a really tremendous project bringing to the public attention and making available millions of pages of newspapers from European countries around the continent. It's a very important project for Libre because it enables our member libraries, over 400 libraries in membership of the consortium, to make available their historic material in a way in which they can't do at the minute. For a user, for a researcher, I'm a historian myself, if you want to use newspapers, you have to go to the physical library in order to see them, to search them, to study them. If you're doing European history or European research, it means you have to go to a lot of different libraries in order to make sure that you've covered all the material that you want to look at. At a stroke, Europeana Newspapers solves that problem because it's making available millions of pages of text from European libraries from their newspaper collections in one place via the Europeana portal. So it's a tremendous gift to research and to scholarship. Let me say something about newspapers in particular. Why are newspapers important? Why did Libre think that newspapers were the next type of content that we should make available? Well, one of the things you want to do if you're a historical researcher is to get as close to the subject as possible. Of course, if your subjects are still alive, if you're talking about people or events, and you can interview individuals who were there or who knew people that were there, you have that sense of immediacy and sense of contact with the subject that you're studying. For people studying older history, like myself, clearly that's not possible. So you go back to printed and written sources and that's where newspapers are important because they are a contemporary record of the events they're describing and the people who are making the news. They're the equivalent of reading a blog or a posting on Facebook today or a tweet on Twitter. Clearly in the 19th century all that technology had never been invented. So where do you go? You go to newspapers. Those are the closest records that we can find to the actual events that we want to analyse and describe. That's why Europeana Newspapers is important and that's why Libre has chosen newspapers as the topic for its next Europeana piece of work.