CULTURE : FRANCE TOP CONTRIBUTOR TO EUROPEANA.

• Position: Brief article

France will contribute 52% of the first 2,000 files that will become accessible to the public via the new European digital library, Europeana. The UK will contribute 10%. Germany's participation is particularly low - only 1% - which can be explained by the fact that the French partner institutions, such as the National Library or the National Audiovisual Institute, are much further ahead in the digitisation of their archives.

In other countries, "though they have been digitised, these riches are not yet available online," explained EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, who launched Europeana with much ceremony with the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and French Culture Minister Christine Albanel (in the name of the French EU Presidency), on 20 November in Brussels.

The service crashed hours after its launch, and is now expected to be back up in the middle of December.

Since 2005, some 1,000 cultural bodies have contributed to the portal...