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.”
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