(from a Guardian report)
The EU yesterday launched the prototype of Europeana, its bold project to
digitise millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from
the most important libraries, museums and archives, and provide them free to
download from one website. The EU commission's head, José Manuel Barroso, called
it a Renaissance moment, as Europe plans to outdo commercial search engines in
the staggering scope of its collection.
But demand for europeana.eu was so great that by 10.30am yesterday it had to be
temporarily closed after crashing under 10m hits an hour. Last night, the site
was still experiencing problems and was again taken offline.
The project was born of a fear among European leaders and culture bosses that
Google was dominating the web, with its Book Search project scanning millions of
books from dozens of world libraries to boost its traffic.
Europeana goes further by providing interactive content, audio and video,
ranging from original texts of Dante's Divine Comedy and the 1789 Declaration of
the Rights of Man, to footage of the fall of the Berlin wall or 1970s
documentaries on the pornographic film market in France. The site will feature
pieces such as the 1215 Magna Carta and a painting by Domenico di Michelino -
Dante illuminating Florence with his Poem - as well as 80,000 broadcasts from
French national archives, including footage from the first world war.
But it will also offer audio pieces from the British Library, such as recordings
of wildlife and every birdcall in Britain, as well as the complete range of
dialects in the UK. Around 1,000 European national libraries, museums and
institutions, including the Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, have
contributed.
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