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In Europe, the response to this new level of support has been varied. In many respects it is similar to that of North America, although the institutional framework from within which this work is carried out is different. There is chronic underfunding for digital activities. Library and cultural heritage institutions attempt to fund digitization activities from their operating costs, but the pressure to maintain traditional core services, outreach, and a (robust) digitization program tips budgets to the breaking point. Moreover, cultural heritage institutions not only do not have a clear mandate to preserve digital materials (particularly when they are already preserving the analogue object), but frequently lack the expertise and resources to create and maintain preservation-level digital objects. Funding in Europe, like the United States, in the past seemed to thwart attempts by institutions—be they digital humanities centers, university libraries, or cultural heritage institutions—to take the long view and build infrastructure to support ongoing digital activities. Funding tends to be short term for specific projects encouraging, even today, the creation of digital silos rather than integrated resources. But these trends may be changing.

The United Kingdom was the first country to take a long view. In 1995, the Joint Information Systems Committee funded the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) at a national level to support data creation, awareness and education, collections, and preservation. 3   At its close thirteen years later, it employed ca. 25 staff and received funding from two national agencies of approximately £1,000,000 (with another million raised from project work). It was the most established, longest running digital creation, training, and curation program in the world. When funding was withdrawn at a single vote by the Board of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a tremor was sent throughout the digital humanities community. Nevertheless, the model was in place long enough for digital humanists in other European countries to lobby for similar infrastructures. 

In Ireland, the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) was established in 2008 (only months after the cessation of the AHDS) to develop an all-island inter-institutional research infrastructure for the humanities by building a platform for the coordination and dissemination of humanities research, teaching, and training. Like the AHDS, the DHO has a three-pronged mission: to be a knowledge resource for digital scholarship in the areas of training, consultations, and the development of infrastructure.  The DHO was funded as part of a larger consortium involving the majority of higher institutions on the island of Ireland through a funding mechanism that supports large-scale inter-institutional frameworks, the Programme of Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI). 

This funding provided the vehicle for humanities researchers to seek funding for a national infrastructure rather than create mini digital humanities centers across Ireland. Nevertheless, the focus of the grant was not so much on developing strategic national e-resources but on funding individual researcher's projects, albeit with many of them delivered in digital form. Thus one of the challenges the DHO has faced is creating a coherence from these disparate projects within one repository.