TechCrunch reported today [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/22/eu-presents-ambitious-open-source-library-digitization-project-site-promptly-crashes/] on the European Union’s new digital library which is temporarily offline:
“A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com.
Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed.
The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday – double server capacity. The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.
Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.
A pair of Dutchmen programmed Europeana in about 10 weeks, said technical developer Eric Van der Meulen. They added the final two of 21 European languages, Finnish and Hungarian, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.
Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications, Van der Meulen said…
Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.
Europeana is an outgrowth of The European Library, on which Van der Meulen also worked. But it has in the press been compared to Google’s Library Project. Copyright concerns are abundant in all three projects.
Viviane Reding, European commissioner for media, worked to bring the European Digital Library to fruition prior to realizing Europeana.
Issues of intellectual property will certainly complicate Reding’s goal of adding 10 million more objects over the next two years. The project will receive 2 million Euro over the next two years for that goal, said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday. For now, all objects on Europeana are in the public domain…
The difference between Europeana and existing library projects, though, is in the diversity of digital objects available on Europeana…”
