Europeana is European Union’s highly ambitious search platform to a collection of European digital libraries with digitized paintings, books, films and archives.  Website went online on Thursday 20th November and was taken down immediately because of overwhelming requests.  Website’s software architect expected maximum five million visits per hours but Europeana received more than fifteen million visits.

Europeana, an online digest of Europe’s cultural heritage, contains two million digital documents and is expected to grow to ten million by 2010.

Sources say that EU only launched online library to complete with Google. Hopefully Europeana’s development team will take some advice from Google, a pioneer in online digital library domain, before going online again in mid-December.