europeana a victim of its own success

There are a number of article documenting the wild success and consequent server failure of the Europeana digital library: Times Online, PublicTechnology.net, and Yahoo Tech. The development site that documents the project is still available.

This is a cautionary tale for those of us who are working on the World Digital Library project, which is set to launch in April 2009. We know that there is a potentially high level of interest in a multi-lingual international digital collection site -- albeit one with a much initial smaller collection -- and seeing this confirms for us that making plans for mirroring is a necessity.