Wide access to large information collections is of great potential importance in many aspects - economic, environmental, health, cultural, social, etc. - of everyday life. Historical video documentaries hold by national audiovisual archives, constitute one of the most precious - from a historical and cultural viewpoint - and less accessible cultural information. This paper presents the ECHO (European CHronicles On line) Digital Library which aims at providing a reusable software infrastructure and new metadata models for old historical documentary films in order to support the development of interoperable audiovisual digital libraries. The ECHO Digital Library is being developed within the ECHO Project funded by the European Commission.