The Bookseller.com

6th July 2009

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Euro digital library down till 'December'

24.11.08

The European Digital Library, Europeana, will not now relaunch until December after users overloaded its servers on its first day. Having experienced problems on its first day, a messsage on the home page reads: "The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour). We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December."

Users instead are redirected to a development site, displaying a further message: "We launched the European.eu site on 20 November and huge use - 10 million hits an hour - meant it crashed."

EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding told Reuters: "It shows the huge interest of European users in this project." Europeana's director, Jill Cousins, said the portal was not just Europe's answer to portals such as Google Book Search, but went a step further.

 

libraries digitisation Europeana