 Monday, 06 September 2010 |
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> Europeana - The European digital library comes and goes
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Europeana - The European digital library comes and goes
Europeana - the digital library designed to showcase Europe’s history, literature, arts and science went online on 21 November, albeit only for a few hours.
Europeana has generated considerable interest amongst users and was forced to temporarily close down a few hours after its launch due to the heavy traffic it received. "We had 10 million hits by the hour of interested Internet users across Europe which led to the fact that at 11:30 am, we had to take the site down to double the computer capacity", Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said. The online digital content is expected to be accessible again around mid-December.
"Europeana offers a journey through time, across borders, and into new ideas of what our culture is. More than that, it will connect people to their history and, through interactive pages and tools, to each other", said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "I now call on Europe's cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form. We should make Europeana a home for interactive creative participation at the fingertips of people who want to mould their own piece of European culture and share it with others. My objective is that in 2010, Europeana will include at least 10 million objects."
The project inspired by ancient Alexandria's attempt to collect the world's knowledge, uses the latest available digitalisation technologies and will give users access to about 2 million digital objects already in the public domain including films, photographs, paintings, audio files, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and books from all around Europe.
The project has been funded by the European Commission under the eContent plus programme and is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations as well as IT experts from all over Europe.
The Europeana team hopes that the project will be fully operational by 2010 and give users around the world direct access to over 10 million works online. Currently available in French, English and German, the project will eventually operate in 21 languages.
http://dev.europeana.eu/
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