Think culture: Europeana.eu from concept to construction
Europeana.eu, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, was launched on 20 November 2008 by the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. The portal gave access to 4.5 million digital objects from over 1.000 contributing heritage collections from every member of the European Union
via a multilingual interface. Overwhelmed by public interest – some 10 million hits an hour – the site slowed to a crawl and was taken down for a substantial hardware reconfiguration. Back up in December in test mode with limited interactive features, the full rebuild and stress testing were completed within the first quarter of 2009, and all elements of the service were fully functioning by April 2009.
This article looks at the genesis, development, launch and future of Europeana.
