The European digital library, Europeana.eu, has been shut down until mid-December, after the site's popularity exceeded all expectations.

The site was launched on  November 20 to much fanfare as Europe's answer to Google's plan to digitize the major English-language research libraries in the U.S. and U.K.

But a rate of 10 million hits per hour promptly crashed the site as Europeans sought access to a trove of cultural artifacts, including famous paintings, the Magna Carta, and Dante's Divine Comedy.

A note on Europeana's development site acknowledged that it had been overwhelmed by traffic and would be rebuilt as a more robust destination. Apparently, engineers had planned for 5 million hits an hour and saw traffic peak at 20 million hits per hour. Initially lanched on three servers, the site was then distributed to six servers, but service was still so slow that administrators concluded they had to shut it down completely.

The site was launched with some 2 million books, maps, documents, photographs, sound recordings, films, and paintings from member countries. The goal is to digitize and make available some 10 million items from the European Union's 27 member countries by 2010.

The EU promised that all material digitized and uploaded to the site would respect the rights of authors and publishers. Google recently reached a $125 million settlement with publishers and authors over its digitization of the contents of major research libraries, including the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities.