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  • From: Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>
  • To: cc-europe AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Cc-europe] europeana online again (sort of)
  • Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:00:30 +0100

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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  • [Cc-europe] europeana online again (sort of), Paul Keller, 12/24/2008

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