Europeana Prototype goes live
Europeana, the Europe-wide, multi-lingual search engine for digital cultural content went live on the 20th November. And promptly fell over!
It was the best kind of system failure, however. It resulted from more than 10 million unique hits on the Europeana servers in a little under an hour following the launch announcement. The web host had provided extra capacity for 5m+ users, but nobody was expecting 10m!
Work is currently underway significantly to extend the capacity available to Europeana, which continues to see a huge amount of interest throughout Europe - even though it is only at the prototype stage.You can find out more by visiting dev.europeana.eu.
The scope and vision for Europeana are breathtaking - its aim is to provide a single point of access to cultural content throughout Europe in more than 23 languages. The Collections Trust is the UK coordinator for the work, and will shortly begin work on EuropeanaLocal - an initiative to encourage UK organisations to submit content to Europeana via the Peoples Network Discover Service.
