IT was there and then gone, but now it’s back. The European Union’s digital library Europeana, which crashed in November, just hours after its launch, became available again last week. When the beta version of the site went live on November 20, it was overwhelmed by a volume of 10 million hits an hour, triggering the crash. European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the website’s server capacity has been quadrupled to cope with demand. However, a message at the site, www.europeana.eu, warns that, “Europeana is testing newly configured hardware. The site is therefore open for you to use but the user experience may not be optimal in this test phase e.g.: the number of users will be limited in peak times.”
Nevertheless, Europeana is functional and growing constantly. The site is part of a new European Union online library project that aims to create a single portal for access to history, art, literature, cinema and music from European sources. Items have been collected from 1,000 museums, national libraries, galleries and archives, so users can search for texts, images, audio files, videos and other artifacts in one website. Images include paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects. Texts may be books, newspapers, letters, poems, diaries and archival papers. Music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts make up the audio files and films, newsreels and TV broadcasts are saved as video.
Why is Europeana important for the Arab World? The first reason is because Arabs and Muslims have had such a large impact on the history of certain parts of Europe and the effects of that impact are documented through numerous European sources. Second, because it is only in recent times that modern museums and libraries have been organized in many Arab nations, the variety of information that can be discovered about the Arab World from searching through the collections of European museums and archives is astounding.
Are you interested in memorabilia from wars fought in the Middle East? Looking for historical photos of Arabs and Muslims? Need inspiration from traditional Islamic art forms? All of it is there at www.europeana.eu. And don’t imagine that all the items are related to ancient times. For example, there are some photographs at the site of a football match between Scotland and Saudi Arabia played in 1989.
The site is available in 25 European languages, but unfortunately not in Arabic. The site has archived about two million items already and it is hoped that six million items will be available by 2010. Whenever possible links are provided so that more information about the item may be accessed at the originating source and many may be downloaded free.
