While I highlighted the running of Europeana yesterday, I see that at least the reaction from the Commission shows some positive signs of transparency. It answers key questions in quite a specific manner, probably because the high attention this launch and closing attracted.

But the sentence “on the basis of expert advice” shows all the difficulty of government dealing with large scale ICT projects without adequate internal skills. It will be interesting to see if the site will be up and running well in December of if problems will persist. I think we are at an important moment of European ICT policy. May I suggest to make a good thorough case study of Europeana in order to learn lessons for government in general?

Rapid – Press Releases – EUROPA

On the first day of its launch, Europe’s digital library Europeana was overwhelmed by the interest shown by millions of users in this new project. On the basis of expert advice, Europeana had anticipated up to 5 million hits per hour on the site. The real interest was 3 times as strong. This massive interest slowed down the service so much that after having already doubled server capacity yesterday at noon, the Europeana management in The Hague (Netherlands) and the European Commission last night had to temporarily take down the site to take pressure off it.

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