Voices en Español

I’ve blogged about this previously, about how far behind the Spanish language is in terms of its presence on the Internet, and today comes another reminder of a tremendous lost opportunity. A new site called Europeana, a massive digital library, flung open its doors yesterday and guess which country has carved out the lionshare of virtual territory? France.

[Update 11/22/08: Europeana crashed and burned the day of its launch after receiving more than 10 million hits an hour. The web site won't be back online until mid-December.]

According to the New York Times, of the two million items that will be made available in the digital library documenting European culture and history, more than half of those items are coming from the French.

So comprehensive is France’s cultural dominance over this cyberspace outpost that other countries are having their own history written for them — in French, of course.

“I find the figures extraordinary,” said Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for the project. “France has half the content — the collapse of the Berlin Wall is illustrated with a French TV documentary.”

What’s stunning is how little the other countries in the European Union cared about contributing to the project until it was completed and then they saw how France had taken it over. Germany has less than 1% content, Spain 1.4% and Great Britian, 10%. How on earth did that happen? Did the arts and culture ministers in those countries not get the memo about this project?

For historians, teachers, students and bloggers, Europeana promises to be a treasure trove of online info as it “combines the digital resources of museums and libraries, and the information provided includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers.”

Most impressive is that the material posted is free of copyright so it can be downloaded for blogs, research or schoolwork by anyone with an Internet connection, according to the NYTimes.

There’s still a little time, of course, for the other EU countries to get on the ball. The European Commission says it wants to have 10 million items in the digital library by 2010. But that’s less than two years away. Can the other EU countries catch up to France by then? Tic-toc, tic-toc.