Good news, bad news for our European colleagues today.
Europeana, which provides access to two million digital objects from the collections of EU cultural institutions, officially launched today. The massive attention it received brought the site to its knees. An estimated 10 million hits an hour caused them to take the site down to double capacity. [I think the closest RLG came to such “success” was back when the internet was a bit less robust. As we launched a service, the internet slowed to a crawl. It took a little while before we realized that a big Victoria’s Secret promotion had simultaneously hit the wires.]
While we enjoyed Europeana’s “Boots” video clip, it will be great to see the real thing in action!
Europeana is well on its way to reaching its goal of ten million items by 2010. While we often think of portals as unnecessarily limiting silos, when a portal opens onto this much content, I think it’s warranted. Of course, we’re interested to see if this content will turn up in Google search results, too.
Ricky Erway, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research, worked with staff from the OCLC Research Library Partnership on projects ranging from managing born digital archives to research data curation. Ricky left OCLC in 2015.
See my critics in German
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5335447/