Grata sorpresa la que me he llevado, aunque sea para anunciar que el servicio esta out.
Seguro que la palabra no te suena. Europeana It is an EU project and its foundations are the creation of a large digital library.
Such has been the enthusiasm of Internet users that the service, one day later, continues to fall. No wonder: 10 million clicks per hour. One, one…you read correctly: 10.000.000 of clicks x hour.
Europeana It started from the idea of several European countries, led by France, in creating the largest European digital library. They say that the initial idea was to compete with a similar idea that Google was working on. They will refer to http://books.google.es/ ? Well, we'll have to wait and see how everything goes..
For now, Google has made a statement where it welcomes Europeana and congratulates it on the project., stating that this project will complement your search for books (Google books).
Most of the content that will be available has been contributed by France, European country that is at the forefront of digitalization, while the rest has been contributed by the 27. Spain provide the 1.4 % of this cultural heritage from the National Library.
I hope your objectives are met 2010 and the expectations of bringing together more than 10 million entries in books, multimedia content, photographs, etc.
From the BNE page (National Library of Spain) A few months ago they commented that:
The European Commission, a strong supporter of the European Digital Library, expressed his support for Europeana. Horst Forster, Director of Digital Content and Cognitive Systems at the EU Information Society Directorate, attended the Conference and commented “Europeana is an ambitious project in its approach and objectives. It is about establishing connections between the wide variety of existing European cultural heritage digitization programs, and promises to become a powerful service. It will allow citizens to explore how ideas were transmitted between countries, how political and social currents developed or how artistic movements have influenced the entire continent”.
Europeana is developing practical, user-defined tools to explore and share content in a multilingual environment. These tools will allow the user to easily combine or compare related material in different countries – for example, the gadgets, images, records and texts related to the Roman Empire, the Vikings or the Renaissance.
Van Gogh's painting A Pair of Shoes is also the starting point of the promotional video on the Europeana website. Set to the music of Nancy Sinatra's hit 1966 These boots are made for walkin de fondo, The video transports the audience on a series of journeys across Europe – the pilgrimage, Searching for a job and going to war.
I consider that this and other movements that are already underway, are the first steps to facilitate and believe that a world of “knowledge” open is possible. Maybe this, currently. it's dreaming but maybe, in a few years, write about how absurd we were ago 10 years old.
You have other interesting projects like the Project Gutenberg (ebooks) and this, that I like a lot, called International Music Score Library (Sheet Music Library).