The Europeana Website is intended to provide a complete cultural archive of the continent, including its history, culture and museum collections, which contain material from all over the world. It includes images of artistic cultural objects, historic and cultural important photographs, ancient and modern manuscripts of texts and music, sound recordings and video, all linked together by a sophisticated Beta search engine.
Such a site provides unrivaled access for anyone one the web to collections and materials essential for understanding Europe, its culture and history, and should be a priceless resource for educators, artists, academics and anyone who wants to enlarge their intellectual horizons. It promises access to objects that would otherwise require expensive travel and credentialed access.
Origin and Development of Europeana
According to The Guardian, former French president Jaques Chirac was infuriated by Google Book Search which aims to place world’s libraries on line. He urged French institutions like the Bibliothèque Nationale to take the initiative. Soon French and English libraries were in competition and the idea of a Europe-wide archive was born. On 28 April 2005, six head of State wrote to the Presidency of the European Commission, urging the creation of a virtual European library that would make its scientific and cultural resources universally accessible. A strategy for creating the site was published on September 30 of 2005. After the development of a prototype in 2007, an initial investment of 3.3 million Euros by the French government and a promise of $91 USD in European funds, the site opened to great fanfare on November 20, 2008.
Europeana Aborts Launch and Retools
Only an hour later the site crashed under an onslaught of ten million hits per hour. After several attempts to fix the problem the site has been taken off line and is scheduled to re-open later this year with a more robust technical platform. It is, however, still possible to sample what it offers with some limitations.
Surfing Europeana
The greatest problem with accessing the site is that the login feature ‘My Europeana’ has been temporarily disabled. This makes it impossible to get full access to many of the manuscripts, works of visual art, and sound recordings listed on the site. Although there is some representation from most EU member countries, most material comes from France, Britain, Holland and Germany. Requests for visual material often lead into the vast but confusing Deutsche Fotothek photographic archive of the Saxon and University Library at Dresden or onto French websites, where one is expected to pay. Still there are many satisfying moments, especially in viewing paintings and sculpture (providing the relevant museum website is working properly), and the site is much more than a collection of thumbnails, as has sometimes been suggested.
The Future of Europeana
Despite its technical teething problems, the enormous audience for the launch of this site suggests that it fills a need, not only in Europe but around the world, for sites with cultural content curated by professional scholars and supported by government funding rather than private sector philanthropy or entrepreneurship. The site also has to solve its copyright problems which are based on archaic "fair use priciples" and are another factor preventing wider access to third party materials. Better models are already out there on the web, including Open Commens and Wikipedia. If these problems can be solved, Europeana’s example spawns imitators in other cultural regions, the web’s promise of uniting a culturally diverse world through real understanding will be that much closer.
References
Angelique Chrisafis, 'Dante to Dialects: EU's on line renaissance,' The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2008
