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.”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Seth Godin called up on the Tribe to write a book together in response to his book Tribes. Take a look:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/TribesQA2.pdf

There’s so much gold here, I can’t choose a snippet to share. Take a look. This would be an excellent discussion point for staff meetings and long range planning. Maybe the new long range plans for some innovative libraries will be: How can they lead the tribe?

Google has released a template to create collaborative pixel art in Google Spreadsheets. Just change the background color of cells in this copy of the spreadsheet I made, and we’ll see where it goes! (Also see Google’s template, video and more.) [Via Andy!]

On that note, have a look at the older Pixel Group page here. You can invert any pixel in the black and white image by clicking it.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Collaborative Spreadsheet Art | Comments]

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Google selected a little village in Upper Austria for a huge Server farm. Google bought 183 acres land to build the new server center for Europe. The new Google data center will provide 50 IT jobs when it opens in two years. The reasons for Google to...

Amanda at blogwithoutalibrary.net writes:

This is from a design/marketing/communications company’s website. I love how they’re not afraid to showcase ideas that didn’t fly:

Think of this as the final resting place for ideas that - for one reason or another - lacked sufficient postage. The road to change is littered with them.

You can’t have innovation without failure, right? I’d love to see libraries celebrating their failures more. If you know of a library that does this, let us know in the comments!

Good stuff. And certainly part of a more open, transparent institution. One commenter ponders that it might not work in  public libraries:

While I think this is a lovely idea in theory, I just don’t see libraries doing it. As much as I would love them to! Public libraries are funded with public money so I’m sure they might see this idea of celebrating “failed ideas” as too close to celebrating “public money wasted”. You know what I mean? I’m not agreeing with that rationale, I’m just putting it out there as one possible reason why were not seeing more libraries do this.

Maybe Academic libraries have more latitude with something like this? I work in a public library and don’t pretend to understand how academics work but perhaps there is less need to be wary of being seen to be wasting money in an academic environment (sorry that was an akward sentence!). Just a thought (but like I said, I don’t know much about academic libs so I could be totally off base).

I think public libraries could certainly do this. Think “Anytown Public Library Innovation Labs” or “Cool County Public Library New Ideas Space” that might spend a bit of time experimenting with new services, new formats and new ways of doing what we do. The program might be prefaced with a statement like this:

Anytown PL’s mission is to promote access to information of all kinds, to anticipate the future needs of our patrons for library services and to give access to ideas in various media. This means we must be looking for new ways to serve our patrons. One way we’ll be doing this is devoting a bit of staff time and library resources to experimenting and trying new things. If you’d like to help, let us know. And we’ll let you know what we’re trying, what hasn’t worked, and what new services we’ll be bringing to you from these explorations.

As a APL patron, I might be very interested to check out the space and see what the staff have cooking. This space might be part of the physical library or part of its virtual presence. 

So, celebrating failures in the public library? I think so. What do you think?