This is a guest post by Kathlyn Clore, Associate Editor at the European Journalism Centre who was kind enough to write this report for us after attending the press event.
A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com.
Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed.
The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday – double server capacity. The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.
Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.
A pair of Dutchmen programmed Europeana in about 10 weeks, said technical developer Eric Van der Meulen. They added the final two of 21 European languages, Finnish and Hungarian, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.
Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications, Van der Meulen said.
“Once we get the thing finished and stabilized, we want to be able to put this down as an open source application so other people can look at it and go, ‘Ok how did you do this?,’ and ‘Wow, maybe we can use this for something.’ The future of computing is open source and not only that but you can get a lot of input from all over the world this way.”
Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.
Europeana is an outgrowth of The European Library, on which Van der Meulen also worked. But it has in the press been compared to Google’s Library Project. Copyright concerns are abundant in all three projects.
Viviane Reding, European commissioner for media, worked to bring the European Digital Library to fruition prior to realizing Europeana.
Issues of intellectual property will certainly complicate Reding’s goal of adding 10 million more objects over the next two years. The project will receive 2 million Euro over the next two years for that goal, said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday. For now, all objects on Europeana are in the public domain.
Reding said Thursday that she encourages users of the site to ‘remix’ what’s available. Moving forward, she plans to facilitate dialogue among various stakeholders to find a way to legally include contemporary works. Nobody wants a black hole when it comes to artifacts from the 21st century, she stated. In particular, she said she will continue discussions with books publishers in order to arrange for digitization of orphan works.
The difference between Europeana and existing library projects, though, is in the diversity of digital objects available on Europeana. Van der Meulen, for example, is able to search the names of his family members and come to a recording of his uncle’s 1970s rock band, the Makkers, or photos of his father Leendert Van der Muelen, a world-class cyclist.
“It’s for a lot of people that way,” he said. “Its a fun toy. Everybody Googles their name, you know. Only with this you get associations with your own name that you wouldn’t find in Google.”
Cool man!!
Now if only someone can get started on digital museums for the rest of the world – Asia, Africa, the Americas – and integrate them all into one big world digital museum
“A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, ”
I can’t reach it. I wanted to see the paintings from the top floor of the Louvre. The renaissance paintings in high res. They don’t let you take pictures on that floor of the museum.
(I know, I tried and a security guard stopped me)
I wanna see those paintings online in high res. The next time I fly to Paris, I’ll be tempted to create a hidden high res camera in sewn in my shirt with hidden thumb trigger so I can snap pics of the paintings when I visit again.
I dunno why it pisses them off if you don’t use flash.
Do they have pics of the Louvre paintings in Europeana or not? The site is constantly down.
” The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour).
We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible.
We will be back by mid-December.
For a preview on Europeana and further information. ”
http://picasawe...511546689912578
Mid-December ????
Why the F!ck is this on TechCrunch today?
Here’s some Louvre pics from my last time in France in case anybody’s interested.
http://picasawe...ebshare/Louvre#
I have pics of the art stuff in the UK and Germany from subsequenty Eurotrips, but they’re kind of sucky. Next time I will be armed with the Android G1 and pictorial for instant GeoTagging.
I’ll never figure out why Arrington and friends report maniacly on websites being down, especially those that haven’t launched yet, but whatever. If anybody knows where I can score high res pics of the top floor of the Louvre let me know. I wanna make some posters for my new Apt.
Enjoy!
should be “subsequent Eurotrips”
This is what happens when politicians and civil servants create something new. High costs, bad results. Looks to me like this is a (bad) PR / buzz thing. Where are the real stats?
“Where are the real stats?”
Does it matter if they only had 1000 hits an hour? Of course not.
Europeans don’t know about CDN and the Akamai cache, and that’s good for America. We’re 2 steps ahead, even in 2008.
TC uses a varnish frontend with backends so Arrington doesn’t have to pay Akamai.
Via: 1.1 varnish
Cause Arrington is fickle like that. I’d say a government project should probably roll out a few grand for CDN though. That’s REALLY cheap of them.
They could at least copy TC and use Varnish with rsynched servers behind a single DNS entry. Even Mike Arrington knows IT better than the Belguim government.
Chris, do you notice you’re talking to yourself?
Plus, The Hague is not in “Belguim” and the Belgian government was not involved in this project…
Why, with your well-documented hate (on this blog and others) for everything French, do you visit Paris at all?
I hope this doesnt turn into a friendster situation. The data is just too important to be mismanaged. Im guessing their semantic archival schema prevents them from using Amazon web services. Good luck to em.
Also, Ive been working on this idea for the past year with a few others. We’ll have a prototype with semantic connections up before christmas. Ping me if you’re interested.
James of UniversalArchive.org
> Amazon web services
Do you really think the EU would host a publicly funded project on US soil? :p
Past 9/11 the EU members realized they’d better route their intra-European bank transactions through a host physically based on European soil instead of an EU organization using US data centers, which has just recently been achieved. As long as Amazon, Microsoft, Force.com cannot guarantee that US institutions will not interfere with EU data and services hosted in their data centers they will not be considered in the foreseeable future.
financial data is totally different.
And amazon does have a European datacenter.
Since it’s such a slow news day some of you may be interested in this:
http://lh6.ggph...7OSK0/adobe.jpg
Adobe is now promoting Zend Platform as the default or preferred platform for Flash development. The rift grows as MS tries to push Silverlight.
I’m pleased, very pleased as a Zend Framework and Zend studio user. If you were a Creative Suite Premium CS3 or Flex 3 license holder you got this email. I have both.
one word ” Awesome”!
Typical EU waste and incompetence.