Europeana 1989: made history - European project launched in Warsaw

Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, has launched a new project titled 'Europeana 1989'. People across Europe are invited to share their experiences, stories and memorabilia from the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain in a digital archive.

This release will also be available in the languages of the former Communist states.

The project started in Poland on Saturday with a public debate and a collection day. Europeana 1989 will continue with collection days in Poland, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary.

For the 25th anniversary in 2014, Europeana 1989 aims to create a vivid and personal picture of the revolutionary events in Europe with stories, photos, videos and sound. Members of the public can contribute their stories at a series of collection days in each of the countries taking part as well as via the project website www.europeana1989.eu.

Read more: Webview : Europeana 1989: we made history - European project launched in Warsaw

EC website hosts more than 14m European cultural items

Europe’s digital library, Europeana – a website that enables anyone to access millions of digitised books, maps, photographs and more from all cultural institutions across Europe - has increased in size to 14 million objects.

Initially targeted at providing around 10 million items, Europeana was set up to explore “new ways to bring Europe’s cultural heritage online”.

Set up in 2008, the service provides paintings, film and film fragments, music clips, books, maps, photographs, newspapers and audiovisual documents. More than 14 million are provided in total – an amount to which Ireland contributed 6.47pc (905,799 items).

For more: EC website hosts more than 14m European cultural items - Digital Life - Digital Life | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service

Valentine's day: Discover Love Through Art on Europeana

Lovers embracing. Romantic poems. Couples walking hand in hand. These are a few of the symbols associated with Valentine's Day, a festival of love celebrated for hundreds of years, and they can all be explored through the paintings, images, sounds and texts of Europe’s cultural heritage, available on Europeana.

For more: campaigns : Campaign Archive

BetaNews: EC hopes to beat US, Google in book-scanning race, may rewrite law to do it - by Scott M. Fulton, III

For the complete report from Betanews click on this link

EC hopes to beat US, Google in book-scanning race, may rewrite law to do it - - by Scott M. Fulton, III

Out of concern that Google may yet be able to scan the printed works of authors worldwide and make them available to Americans but not Europeans, two leading European Commissioners this morning set forth on a plan they hope could beat Google to market. Their plan involves Europeana, the online portal for the collected works of the EU's member countries, which is still officially in beta, though has come a long way from its extremely rocky first tests last year.

Commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Viviane Reding this morning issued an official "Communication" regarding their plan to use Europeana.eu as a portal for the publication of printed European works that have fallen into the public domain, as well as "orphaned" works -- books that may still be under copyright protection, but which no author or publisher has recently claimed.Out of concern that Google may yet be able to scan the printed works of authors worldwide and make them available to Americans but not Europeans, two leading European Commissioners this morning set forth on a plan they hope could beat Google to market. Their plan involves Europeana, the online portal for the collected works of the EU's member countries, which is still officially in beta, though has come a long way from its extremely rocky first tests last year.

TechCrunch: EUROPEANA - EU Presents Ambitious Open-Source Library Digitization Project -Site Promptly gets 10 million hits per hour and crashes

For the complete report from TechCrunch click on this link

EUROPEANA - EU Presents Ambitious Open-Source Library Digitization Project - Site Promptly gets 10 million hits per hour and crashes

A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com. Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed. The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday - double server capacity.

The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.

Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.

Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications. Everything on Europeana is allowed to be downloaded. Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.