Digital library 'Europeana' crashes on heavy demand on launch day news
24 November 2008

Europeana, a web site that was to offer some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, maps, audio and video clips on European cultural heritage opened on Thursday only to crash within 24 hours due to unanticipated heavy demand on its servers.

The site was built for a maximum 5 million hits an hour, but it received over 15 million hits, an unusual phenomenon for any web site associated with the European Union.

On Friday surfers who tried to log on to the site were greeted by a  message telling them that the service was not available till mid-December due to a capacity upgradation process that was under way.

Meanwhile, disappointed surfers are wondering why the site was not prepared for the traffic. They also believe that three weeks is an inordinately long time to fix whatever are the problems with Europeana.

The project is funded by the European Commission. It is a partnership comprising 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe.

The interface, which will be multilingual, will be initially available in French, English and German. It will then be developed to include other languages following the launch.
 
According to EU Information Society Commissioner, Viviane Reding, Europeana will feature 10 million works from all over Europe in 2010; these will be available in 23 languages.

Several European museums, notably the British Museum and the Louvre, have contributed to the project. However, many European cultural institutions in Europe have been hesitant to offer digitised items to Europeana due to perceived lack of interest among the public. The success of the web site has proved them wrong said project officials.


 search domain-b
  go
 
Digital library 'Europeana' crashes on heavy demand on launch day