At the Bridging Worlds conference in Singapore last month, I was lucky enough to hear Fleur Stigler talking about her work with The European Library and Europeana site. You can access her paper from my post in Kete.
Well Europeana launched last week, with around 3 million digital items, including paintings, photos, films, books, maps and manuscripts from 1,000 museums, national libraries and archives across Europe. Unfortunately the site crashed only a couple of hours later. Turns out the response from the world was insane - 10 million hits and hour - and completely overwhelmed the system.
Fantastic I say. Simply proves the very real, global interest in such an initiative. Europeana will be up and running again sometime in December once they have revamped the technological problems.
Some interesting facts:
- Content includes the full score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the French Declaration Human Rights of 1789, the English Magna Carta, Dante's Divine Comedy and the Gutenberg Bible.
- Material is free of copyright.
- Half of the objects are French more>>
- Aim is to have 10 million objects by 2010.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment