Europeana [Updated]

UPDATE: European online library crashes

BBC:

The British Library in London is among more than 1,000 cultural organisations making contributions to a European online library.

The free multimedia venture, Europeana, will also see input from the European Commission and the Louvre Museum.

Internet users will be able to access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films.

These will be sourced from institutions across the EU's member states.

Further expansion for the project, which was created by the European Commission and is run by the European Digital Library Foundation, is planned for 2010.

Now that the internet is starting to foster international partnerships based on ideals of free, distributed knowledge (Wikipedia kickstarted this fantastic craze, now it seems governments are catching up) there are some issues this raises. With the democracy of publishing that the internet allows, and the uncertain future of print (not whether it will exist but what form it will take) how will ventures such as the above vet newly published material for suitability? As the boundaries between print and online publishing spheres blur evermore, will traditional structures of publishing follow, or will something undeniably more open but undeniably more difficult to navigate take its place? And if so, on what criteria will material find its way into our libraries, into our online archives and into our academia?