For all of you who think the interwebz isn't popular...

We haz the Europeana site!! Ok, no more lolspeak today, but this is a really cool initiative where the European Commission has invested just scads of euros to create a Europe wide digital library available online 24/7. Cool right?

Well, it is until you get 10 million hits per hour when you launch causing the site to crash.....

So the site is recalibrating and should be relaunched in mid December. You can click here for the future site

I find this just fascinating for two reasons; firstly, wow, ten MILLION hits an hour? That's a popular website. I wonder if we can learn from something like this and have more efforts being put forth into digitization on a large scale. They will be featuring items from the Louvre and the British Museum to name but two museums. According to one article,"the images online include the Magna Carta from Britain, the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”" (NYT Nov 20, 2008).

The second reason this fascinates me is due to the fact that France apparently dominates submissions to the Digital Library. I lived there four years ago and found the internet to be a little lame on French websites. I have to take that view back since I used Les Archives du Rennes last year for a project and it was a fabulous website. The website for La Ville du Rennes is also quite good. And France had submitted over half of the two million articles that were up on Europeana, even writing other countries' histories for them (NYT Nov 20, 2008). I'm not sure if this is part of trying to protect the French Culture, or if France has placed a great emphasis on being part of digital initiatives, but they have so much culture to draw upon.....I can see why they submitted so much!

I look forward to going on the new version of the Europeana website to see what it's like. And I'd also be curious to see what sorts of bells and whistles they are using, as maybe those could be used here in Canada. Well, that is if we ever got digitization funding again.....