Since they invented the Internet, Universities have always been major actors in the R&D as well as encouraging the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). European universities were, and still are, strongly encouraged by their governments and by the European Commission to develop e-learning skills and to encourage their academic communities to make intensive use of ICT, in large part because of the fascinating and challenging new development possibilities that ICT brings- in particular in the field of education.
As a consequence, ICT departments have grown in all the leading European universities, and they have worked hard to improve the integration of ICT into the academic habits of their faculty and students. In these universities, the result is an exponentially-growing volume of digital resources: not only lectures and pedagogical e-resources, but also audiovisual documents to promote scientific and technological culture, event-based documents on meetings, results of scientific research (articles and reports), as well as conferences and scientific and technological debates.
The use of these digital resources remains almost solely confined to the university which produce them, this despite :

• the ongoing process of construction of a Europe of knowledge (building a European higher education area). This process promotes the collaboration between universities, the emergence of European diplomas and the development of e-learning as an easy means of access to education for all people.
• the European Commission's incentive to accelerate the development of the information society, via the eEurope 2002 and eEurope 2005 action plans and more specifically via the eContent program. The latter is part of the eEurope action plans and aims at improving access to high-quality digital content on the global networks, in a mutiplicity of languages.