A SPIN ON A CRASH.

• Position: Brief article

The European Commission has a gift for spin-doctoring: it made the false start of the European online library, Europeana, a resounding success. Europeana had to be "temporarily" closed due to excess traffic less than 24 hours after its much-celebrated launch. In place of a homepage, you will now read, until mid-December, "The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour). We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December." But the Commission sees this as an opportunity for good publicity for the portal, which national institutions balked at contributing to. "We are not going to make...