Europeana Launches to ‘Overwhelming’ Success
Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, Europeana, was launched to the public today. It attracted so much interest that it website was swamped within the first few hours.
Europeana had expected, after taking expert advice, to get peaks of 5 million hits per hour. However the real figure was 3 times this. This led to the site running very slowly as over 3 thousand users were trying to search at the same time. After valiant attempts to increase the capacity with the existing hardware it was decided to close the site for the moment and return when the teething problems are solved.
It is interesting to look at where the hits were coming from (where they could be determined). The most interest came from Germany (17%), France (10%), Spain (9%), Italy (6%) and The Netherlands (5%). 4% came also from the United States with 3% from the UK.
The next few days will see major upgrades to the system with a projected return to normal operation in mid-December. In the meantime it is still possible to view the prototype website at:
