Europe's answer to Google Books went on line today and was immediately bogged down by traffic. The site, www.europeana.eu, gives viewers access to some 2 million books, images, paintings and other cultural objects.

"Europeana offers a journey through time, across borders, and into new ideas of what our culture is. More than that, it will connect people to their history and, through interactive pages and tools, to each other," EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

Trying to avoid the battle over digitization with publishers that ended  with Google paying $125 million to settle, the initial contents are all in the public domain, but they reflect Europe's rich cultural heritage: Dante's "Divine Comedy", manuscripts from Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin, and Britain's Magna Carta are just a few. The EU is expected to negotiate rights with publishers and copyright holders to broaden the contents of Europeana.


The goal of Europeana is to provide 6 million works by 2010, to refine the multilingual aspects and enable internet users to interact on the site. Most of the initial contents are from France, which led the effort to create the digital library after Google's announcement that it would digitize the contents of many of the world's leading research libraries - most of them in English.

Google said welcomed the EU initiative. 

"Digitization projects like Europeana send a strong signal that authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies can work together to democratize access to the world's collective knowledge," Santiago de la Mora, head of Google's book partnerships in Europe, told reporters.

Four years after Google Book Search was launched, it has some 7 million books in its catalog.

The European Commission has committed 120 million euros to improving the digitization process and another 40 million euros in multilingual projects including automatic translation.

The site froze after traffic reached 10 million hits an hour. "It shows the huge interest of European users in this project," Reding's spokesman said.