CULTURE : EUROPEAN DIGITAL LIBRARY TO REOPEN IN MID-DECEMBER.

To access European culture', visit www.europeana.eu - but not before the middle of December. After three years of negotiations, Europeana, the European digital library, was launched in 21 languages, on 20 November. However, just hours after its launch, the new online library crashed after having received more than twice the number of hits than anticipated (ten million per hour). Once reopened, this unique information portal will enable Europeans to consult more than two million documents - books, tables, photographs, musical works, maps and films - from European libraries, archives and museums free of charge.

"Europeana will offer access to European culture online. It will facilitate access to the riches that make up European culture and history," said EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, on 17 November, before the 2008 Avignon Forum Culture, a growth factor'. The event brought together 250 key players from the Union's economic, cultural and media sectors. Europeana's users will be able, for example, to compare the way in which major episodes in Europe's history were experienced and analysed, through documents, newspapers and objects from the time, from one country to another. Or even "virtually recompose works of art until then dispersed at the four corners of the world," explained the commissioner, who has been in charge of the project since 2005.

Two million objects "is an amazing start. Is it enough? I'm not sure, and I'm particularly thinking about our young generation," she nonetheless notes, convinced that Europeana will profoundly change the way students, researchers, professionals and art and history lovers will access European cultural heritage.

Back in the summer, Reding had jostled the 27 member states by urging them to spend more on the digitisation of their works, knowing that national libraries - the most advanced cultural institutions - only have 1% of their works digitised. Their predictions estimate just 4% by 2012. "The road is still long," added the commissioner. Her objective: ten million objects digitised in 2010. To speed up the process, the EU executive had announced in mid-August its intention to invest some 120 million over the next two years in technologies and the development of Europeana and about 40 million in multilingualism tools. Eventually, the users will be able to find their research in their own language and receive responses with the help of an automatic translation system.

Europeana...