European Culture Crashes
The Guardian reports: The European Union 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 like Google in the staggering scope of its collection. But demand for europeana.eu was so great that by 10.30 am yesterday it had to be temporarily closed after crashing under 10m hits an hour. This morning, the site was still not functioning properly. The good news: there’s tremendous interest out there for dipping into Europe’s rich cultural heritage. The bad news: that heritage can be hard to drag fully into the 21st century.
