I first read about Europeana almost a year ago and it seemed promising but not ready for prime time. In reading a fascinating and critical discussion of the project by Ricky Erway at OCLC Research in Liber Quarterly that points out the website’s shortcomings. I would have to second the concern about uneven participation; not all members of the EU are represented. That said, they are off to a strong start. As of today, there are contributions from: the UK, France, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Poland, Italy, Spain and others. Of course, I had some fun browsing around the service and running searches to see what I could find. The search results are a little confusing since you get text (which apparently includes library catalogue records but not the actual item), audio, video and images. Based on some previous experimentation, it looks like this service is best at obtaining images. The search interface is top notch when it comes to providing faceted search; you can drill down on date, country, contributor and so forth.

Online communities and a timeline browsing tool are two of Europeana’s more promising aspects but they leave something to be desired. Compared to the World Digital Library, Europeana’s timeline browsing tool is not well implemented. I also wonder about the communities idea; there are six groups with less than four hundred members in total. Would it not make more sense to make connections to establishes social networks like Facebook rather than trying to get people to participate in Europeana broad topic based communities dedicated to classical music, museums and other cultural subjects. If you are interested in European culture and libraries, this is a website to check in on periodically.

You may want to read my posts on other digital library projects:

• Digital Library of the Caribbean: a review

• The World Digital Library: a review

Related posts:

1. The World Digital Library
2. Digital Library of the Caribbean: a review
3. Digital Humanities