Access to cultural heritage on the Internet is often restricted or limited in scope, and the overall availability is still inadequate for scholarly needs. Based on an initiative from several Max Planck Institutes in the Humanities, “ECHO - Cultural Heritage Online”, (http://www.echo-project.eu) - makes freely and openly available a wide scope of materials pertinent to cultural heritage covering 5.000 years of documented human history and including ancient documents, rare books and museum objects. At the same time, the repository offers appropriate open source tools to allow for scholarly work with these digitized resources and for integrating sources, on-going research, and dissemination of results in a workbench for humanities' scholars.

The current holdings summary of ECHO lists more than 1000 source authors in 80 collections and several disciplines and thematic fields, 880,000 high resolution images of historical and cultural source documents and artefacts, over 240 film sequences of scientific source materials, and more than 57,500 full-text page transcriptions in several languages. The ECHO network includes more than 170 institutions from 24 countries worldwide as active knowledge weavers.

The basic principles of ECHO and the underlying concept of a scholarly workbench for the humanities will be explained on behalf of examples of source materials which have been collaboratively digitized, transcribed and made available in cooperation of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and othe scientific institutions. Special attention will be given to the development of tools adressing scholarly use needs that only now uncover the full potential of open access to digitized sources by opening up new ways of addressing research questions and that have the capability to fundamentally change the basis of humanities' scholarship.

In the digital age the medium Internet and advanced technologies allow for fast and easy to use solutions for working with extensive corpora of knowledge in a global network of scholars as well as for innovative platforms for rapidly disseminating scholarly content.