No Service

In "New European Digital Library Proves Too Popular," The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the fate of Europeana, a new multidigital library portal, which crashed catastrophically when its servers could not handle the traffic from worldwide interest in its collections, which include not only libraries but also museums from throughout the continent. This PowerPoint-style explanation for a librarians' conference explains some of the organizational and logistical challenges faced by the group, including issues involving branding the project and negotiating consensus in the face of emerging technologies of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 with interfaces for widgets and APIs.

The Virtualpolitik book has a chapter about national digital libraries that looks at the politics of this kind of digitization and includes material from an interview with former BNF chief Jean-Noël Jeanneney.