Europe's answer to Google Book Search officially launched Thursday after two years of prep – and promptly crashed.
Europeana hosts about 3 million digital objects: film materials, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers from the past 2,000 years and over 1,000
institutions in the 27 EU states.
First-day demand for this trove – estimated at about 10 million hits an hour – proved overwhelming for the site's servers. At this writing, dinner time in Paris, it is still not possible to access the site.
"It shows the huge interest of European users in this project," a spokesman to EU Information Society Commissioner Vivian Reding told Reuters.
