Malta still a dot on Europe's first online library

Malta's contribution to Europeana, Europe's first online multimedia library, is considered weak by EU officials responsible for the project.

The website was launched on November 20 putting famous works such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Beethoven's 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.

It proved to be so popular that it crashed, its servers overwhelmed by 10 million hits an hour. It is now in the process of being reopened in a more robust version by mid-December.

The website gives users worldwide multilingual access more than 200 million digitised books, films, paintings, sounds and newspapers from Europe's greatest collections. It opens up a whole new way of exploring the Continent's heritage. Anyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema, will have free and fast access to Europe's masterpieces in a single virtual library.

Malta is being featured with antique maps of the island dating back to the 17th century. But according to the EU officials responsible for the project, Malta's content in Europeana is still very weak.

"Malta still has a lot to do to catch up with the leading European countries when it comes to digitisation. We would encourage Malta to see digitisation not as a costly exercise but as a win-win situation for its economy and citizens," an official said.

So far, the official said, it seems like Malta has no public-private partnerships between cultural institutions and the private sector to increase funding for digitisation.

The country needs to draw up concrete plans on how much material will be digitised in the coming years. "Malta still lacks methods and technologies for the preservation of digital material, which is vital for content to remain accessible to future generations," the official added.

A spokesman for Heritage Malta, the islands' link with the European Commission on this project, said that the bulk of Malta's contribution to this initiative will be uploaded by the end of the year because content, including audiovisual material, is still being digitised.

The inauguration of the website was considered to be the first step in the project. It is expected that by 2010 Europeana will provide access to millions of items representing Europe's rich cultural diversity and have interactive zones such as communities for special interests.

Between next year and 2011 about €2 million a year of EU funding will be dedicated to the project.

Europeana can be accessed at www.europeana.eu where a video will give a taste of what is online until the actual site is reopened.