Last week the European Commission launched Europeana, a digital library of over two million documents, art, video and audio clips chronicling the continent's culture and history.
The site, funded in several million euros by 27 nations, went down hours after launch due to "overwhelming interest" — about 10 million hits per hour, according to site's temporary error page.
Europeana includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers, entirely free from copyright. Material can be used for non-commercial purposes by bloggers, researchers, and students.
During the process of gathering the digital resources from European museums and libraries, some expressed doubt there would be enough public interest to make the project worthwhile, The New York Times reports.
But according to site administrators, site servers sometimes suffered 15 million hits an hour, three times the max amount they were prepared for. Calling Europeana "a victim of its success," admins assured visitors they are upgrading computer capacity and will have the site back up by mid-December.
Part of the problem was that thousands of users searched simultaneously for famous cultural works such as the "Mona Lisa" or manuscripts by Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce.
Users arrived from all over the globe, but most interest predictably came from within the European Union. Germans comprised 17% of the total traffic, followed by France (10%) and Spain (9%). Some 6% of searches came from Italy, 5% from the Netherlands, and 4% each from Belgium and the US.
But while interest was relatively well-spread, the work of one country dominated the site offerings. Material from France is reportedly responsible for at least half its content, writes the International Herald Tribune. Some historical events that occurred in other countries — the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance — are chronicled in French-made documentaries.
1% of the site's overall content is about Germany, 1.4% about Spain, and 10% about Britain. Bruno Racine, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, commented that "in the long run" the percentage of French culture on the site is not expected to be as high as 50%. In fact, the EC is still gathering material, with the goal of putting 10 million items onto the digital library by 2010. The ultimate cost of the project is estimated at €350 million to €400 million.
Some have compared the Europeana project to Google's effort to digitize and index the content of American libraries. In 2005, when the Google Print project was introduced, French nationalists voiced concerns that it would have an Anglo — specifically American — bias in terms of book (and language) selection.
More than three years hence, Google officially welcomed Europeana to the 'net in a written statement, suggesting it could be "the biggest technological leap in disseminating knowledge since Gutenberg invented the printing press."
