New Digital Material Online: Europeana.eu and Google Life

Submitted by Maurice on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 11:34

Europeana

So, they finally did it. Starting from today, the scheduled starting date, Europeana, the EU's flagship in the i2010 digital library initiative is finally up and running.

It seems to be meant as a beta, though and it really seems buggy. The start page apparently has some fancy flash that slows down the site enormously (feels like more than a minute). I tried to register and got the error message that my confirmation has expired. After about 10 minutes? No way. I gave up searching for interesting content after waiting for I don't know how many minutes of several pages loading... Let's check if it's better tonight.

Google LIFE Photo Archive

By the way, did you see that Google and AOL teamed up to provide 10 MIL photos from the Life magazine on the web? It was anounced the day before yesterday (comp. [5]). Apparently, they start with 2 MIL photo, the rest is supposed to come still (see [4]).

You can find those photos thru normal google images service ([6]) if you use the "source:lif" as a search phrase or you use the portal set up for that collection (see [2]).

Since many of the pictures are really old - apparently since the 1860s and older-, I wonder what the copyright status of this collection is. "Time Inc." claims a copyright on the site. Apparently, the photographer is shown when known, so it should be possible to determine the copyright status for individual photos. Others have had similar thoughts on copyright, of course (http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-11-18-n90.html).

I didn't know they had photos back then and indeed there seem to be other pictorial representations such as etchings and not only photos. To talk of these as photos seems to be an effect of the Google society and the digital media..

LINKS

[1] http://www.europeana.eu

[2] http://images.google.com/hosted/life

[3] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Leben-im-Bild-Google-zeigt-10-Millionen-L...

[4] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/life-photo-archive-available-on-g...

[5] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-11-18-n90.html

[6] http://images.google.com