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| EU's New Digital Library Downed on Day 1 |
| Europeana's popularity far exceeds expectations, goes offline till next month |
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Timothy James Neale (Two4Tea)  |
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Published 2008-11-23 11:29 (KST) |
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The European Union's digital library, Europeana, opened on Nov. 20, only to be overwhelmed and crash. Inspired by ancient Alexandria's attempt to collect the world's knowledge, Europeana objective is to bring Europe's cultural heritage out of its museums and libraries and onto the Internet.
The European Commission is behind Europeana and provides the annual budget of 2.5 million euros (US$3.15 million). At its launch commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said, "Europeana is much more than a library; it is a veritable dynamo to inspire 21st century Europeans to emulate the creativity of innovative forbears like the drivers of the Renaissance."
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| The site was designed to handle up to five million users per hour. It was receiving 10 million hits an hour when it crashed on its first morning. Despite increasing the number of servers from three to six, the site crashed again early that evening. It is now offline and displays the message, "We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible." Officials hope it will be back online by mid-December 2008.
Giving visibility to hidden treasures
Started 2005, the European Digital Library Foundation runs the project. Its staff of 14 coordinates the digitizing activities of the national libraries, museums and archives of the EU member states. Some 1,000 organizations including the Louvre in Paris, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and the British Library have provided material.
The EU Commissioner responsible for new technologies is Viviane Reding. She said Europeana will, "give greater visibility to all the treasures hidden deep in our libraries, museums and archives." Enabling, "a Czech student to browse the British library without going to London, or an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre."
Only a fraction of content online
Europeana currently holds some two million paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents. The number of documents provided varies considerably between states. France has provided 52 percent of the present content, with the UK and the Netherlands providing ten-percent each. Finland and Sweden have so far added a sizeable contribution with eight and seven percent respectively. Other countries have contributed less than two-percent each, with nine countries contributing less than 0.1 percent of the content each.
There are an estimated 2.5 billion works in Europe's public libraries. The aim is to have 10 million works available by 2010. "I now call on Europe's cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form," said Reding.
The Europeana site is available in almost all official EU languages with Maltese and Bulgarian to be added soon. For now, searches return only documents tagged in the language of the keywords. Searching for "treaty" will only yield material tagged with the word "treaty." However, it is intended to developed technology to perform cross-language searches, allowing search on the word "treaty" to return documents tagged with "trattato" etc.
Europeana is not the only digitizing project launched this decade. Microsoft launched an online library project at the end of 2006, but abandoned it 18 months later, having digitalized only 750,000 books. Google launched its Book Search at the end of 2004 and now claims some seven million books online. In fact, Europeana was a response to Google Book Search
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©2008 OhmyNews
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