Welcome to Europeana

Europeana: think culture

Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 2 million digital items.

* Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
* Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
* Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
* Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe's

* museums and galleries
* archives
* libraries
* audio-visual collections

Here is a list of the organisations that our content comes from. They include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris.

You can use My Europeana to save searches or bookmark things. You can highlight stuff and add it to your own folders.

This website is a prototype. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 6 million digital objects.

Europeana.eu is funded by the European Commission and the member states.

Well, that all sounds pretty euro-groovy. But what, I wonder can you do with it?

To find out, I went to the most important page on the site, the terms and conditions; which said:

Copyright

Europeana portal will offer:

* Editorial parts using material for which copyright issues and rights to reuse is cleared
* Content: parts of bibliographic description and low resolution images given to us by the contributing EuropeanaNet Thematic Network partners to build the Europeana common access point to their own web site

The whole Europeana index and website is an online database owned by the European Digital Library Foundation.

For the purpose of this Europeana prototype (which is just a pilot demo) there is no formal agreement signed defining precisely where and how the rights are expressed in the metadata that Europeana are aggregated. Some metadata contain the expressed rights and in other cases the user is given more information on the provider's own web site when clicking to see, read, listen to or watch the object. So Europeana for the purposes of this prototype will adopt the following Copyright statement from the MLA Discovery portal:

All third-party material presented within this website are subject to individual Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) conditions and licences. Providing details of such IPR and licensing is the responsibility of third-party sources and should be either presented within this website or available from the originating sources of the third party material

The lack of written agreement with each provider, other than the Thematic Network Agreement signed by each of the contributing partners, means that for this prototype a detailed Terms and Conditions of Use statement is not possible.

The European Digital Library Foundation and its content contributors hold the copyright for all material and all content in this site, including site layout, design, images, programs, text and other information (collectively, the "Content") held in Europeana.eu. No material may be resold or published elsewhere without the European Digital Library Foundations written consent, unless authorised by a licence with the European Digital Library Foundations or to the extent required by the applicable law.

In other words, a complete and utter dog's breakfast. Not that this is the fault of those behind Europeana: it's a reflection of the unworkable mess that copyright has become. Time to simplify it:

copyright lasts for a maximum of 14 years

- und damit basta.

Stop European Software Patents (Again)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Windows: Rat's Nest and Dog's Breakfast

As Edward Tufte has explained far more eloquently than I can, images are able to convey information far more compactly and efficiently than words. So you don't have to be a geek to appreciate the two images in this posting:

Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture.

Well, not quite. The upper picture shows Apache running on GNU/Linux; the lower, IIS running on Windows. The former looks like a motherboard: complicated but orderly; the latter is simply a rat's nest.

As the post says:

A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.

Now, some have criticised this on the grounds that people don't attempt to attack systems through static Web pages. This is true, but the point is, if this is the difference for a simple operation like displaying a Web page, imagine the contrast for more complex tasks. It is precisely those tasks that offer the greatest scope for finding weaknesses. Thus the images in the post above offer a graphic, if not literal, representation of the dog's breakfast that is Windows security. (Via Slashdot.)