Think culture.
The European Union would like you to think culture and they've made it possible. Today, according to their schedule, the 27 members invite you to browse European literature, film archives, pictures and more. By the time everything's digitized, there will be six million pieces of Europe available for anyone with a computer.
When it's up, that is, but it isn't at the moment because the server got overwhelmed as soon as it the site went live. 10 million hits in an hour is more than any server can take, but it does demonstrate how excited people are.
Once things calm down, anyone with a yearning to see what once would have required an expensive journey to Europe can go to: http://www.europeana.eu. And then browse to your heart's content.
Only items in the public domain will be available, with the Europeans taking a cue from Google's expensive debacle.
This being run by the EU, you can find what you're looking for in English, or French, or German.
And it's better than Google's Book Search, or so they say. Hard to tell when the site's crashed so quickly, and Google is running just fine right now.
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