Europe’s culture web site crashes after launch

Europeana, a digital library for Europe and a two year project funded by the European Commission, has crashed hours after its launch, and may not be back up until mid-December.

The library would have given users access to some two million digitized books, films, paintings, newspapers and sound recordings from Europe’s greatest collections.

But the web site buckled after receiving around 10 million hits an hour, according to the EU.

“We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible,” is the current note on the web site.

Users can still access a preview of the library by clicking through to the Project Development Site, although this project site is only in English - the real Europeana will hold a multilingual interface.

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