CNBC Business | Evolution of the web

Evolution of the web

A new EU-backed website, Europeana, promises to bring the continent's cultural treasures together

Forget Britney Spears, videos of kittens and pornography. All it seems that web surfers have been waiting for is a touch of culture. Traffic to an EU-funded site, www.europeana.eu, which digitises treasures from museums and collections across the continent, peaked at a staggering 13 million within a few hours of going live. 

The Netherlands-based website, which launched last November enshrines two million pictures, books, audio and video recordings, including everything from Homer’s Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses. A search for, say, Charles Darwin, will bring up oil portraits, personal documents and his original texts. As digitisation gains momentum, over 10 million items will eventually be searchable.  

Although the popularity of Google Books was an inspiration, the project’s Jonathan Purday says the impetus was ideological as much as technological: “We wanted to bring down the barriers when looking at culture. It shouldn’t matter if a book or painting is in the Czech Republic or in France, you should be able to access it anywhere.”  

Purday, who says he expected five million hits an hour, muses that the development of European culture was rarely constrained by borders. “Rubens, for example, painted for all the crown heads of Europe, from London to Madrid. Since then his works have been sold and resold, and spread across all the collections of Europe.” Europeana promises to gather them all in one place. 

There was clearly a pent-up demand. Within five hours of going live the site ran out of servers as Europeans rushed to reacquaint themselves with their heritage. Everyone, that is, except the British. While 27% of traffic on the first day came from Germany and France, fuelled by heavy news coverage, just 3% of visitors came from the eurosceptic UK.  Perhaps they are waiting for more revelations about Britney.