Cc-europe mailing list

[Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>]

dear all,
europeana is back online (limited users at peak times): http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ 
 bonus: if you use creative commons as search term you get a bit of  
an impression of the work our cher ami Patrick has been doing in  
Luxembourg.
cheers, paul

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081223-eus-digital-library-back-online-after-mass-server-overloads.html

> EU's digital library back online after mass server overloads
> By Jacqui Cheng | Published: December 23, 2008 - 05:15PM CT
>
> The European Union's digital online library, Europeana, is back  
> online after having been taken down by massive Internet traffic  
> after its public launch last month. Europeana is not yet open to the  
> public again, though, and a notice on the site says that it is being  
> tested on "newly configured hardware." As a result, the number of  
> users will be limited during peak times.
>
> "Europeana works again... after we have quadrupled server capacity,"  
> European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr told the press today in  
> a news briefing, according to Reuters.
>
> Europeana allows users everywhere free access to the rich archives  
> of EU's 27 member states. The library includes more than 2 million  
> books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings,  
> and films from national libraries and cultural institutions, all of  
> which have been digitally encoded and uploaded to Europeana. The EU  
> plans to continue adding content over the next several years,  
> growing the library even more.
>
> Upon public launch in November, the site was overwhelmed by more  
> than 10 million hits per hour, which took down the server for and  
> force a new backend server architecture. Though EU officials were  
> secretly pleased by the overwhelming response, it took a little over  
> a month to get things back online—even now, it appears as if the  
> site is not completely ready for heavy loads. Still, if you manage  
> to catch Europeana during an off-peak time, you can poke around and  
> find some real gems hidden among the millions of available works.
>
> Right now, Europeana mainly offers content that is public domain,  
> which should allow it to avoid the same type of copyright issues  
> that Google faced when trying to let users browse books online. At  
> the same time, however, the European Commission said that it's in  
> talks with rightsholders to work out a way to add copyrighted  
> materials to the online archive.
>
> The EU's objective is to have more than 10 million works available  
> through Europeana by 2010, and it hopes to achieve that growth by  
> funding Europeana to the tune of €2 million per year between 2009  
> and 2011.


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