EU’s online library reopens

The European Union’s huge digital library Europeana, which crashed just after its November launch, has been relaunched.

The multilingual site crashed due to far higher than planned demand. The website’s server capacity has been quadrupled to cope with demand.

The site, which gives multilingual access to cultural collections across the EU, was relaunched just before Christmas. 

Europeana provides a digital repository for more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, documents and films. By 2010 it is hoped more than 10 million works will be available on the site.

The site was swamped by users on its launch on 20 November, with a volume of 10 million hits an hour, triggering a crash.

Many of Europe’s top museums, such as the British Museum and the Louvre in Paris, have contributed to the project.