Too many people are excited about Europeana, a pan-European digital library, archive, and museum. Last week, when the project’s prototype Web site debuted, it got 10 million hits per hour — and crashed.

Reporting the news, Library Journal quoted Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for Viviane Reding, the commissioner in charge of the project. Mr. Selmayr managed to find a silver lining in the situation, telling reporters that Europeana was a “victim of its success.”

With 27 countries participating, the online venture already has some two million digitized objects in its virtual collection, including not just books, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts, but also sound recordings, paintings, and even...

In order to read this blog you must first answer the following security question:

What is the name of my family’s dog?

A new web service, Friendbo, offers to pose a similar question — one which only you and select group of friends know — to anyone who seeks to view information you post on your blog, or on sites like Facebook and YouTube. The more people learn about you, the more access they’ll have.

A group of faculty and students at the University of Washington is workingto demonstrate how the application can be used to protect data on Facebook profiles. The researchers hope Friendbo will better protect the privacy of Facebook users and make sharing information online more natural.

Managing blacklists and whitelists can lead to...

Why are so many beloved trees being cut down on Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus? University officials turned to the Internet to explain why to students, faculty members, and alumni — with a series of online videos, as well as with a page of frequently asked questions and a map showing trees to be taken down.

A disease called elm yellows has afflicted 47 of the university’s 287 landmark elm trees, some dating as far back as 1890 and standing as tall as 115 feet. The disease, according to one Penn State video, is believed to kill every tree it attacks, and the only way the university knows to fight it is to cut down affected trees in hopes of limiting the disease’s...

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who want to use their iPhones to look at course syllabi or check the campus-shuttle schedule can now surf to a version of the MIT Web site designed especially for cellphones. And officials plan to let other colleges use the Mobile Web project software.

The goal of the project is to create MIT Web pages that load quickly and look good on all kinds of Web-capable cellphones, often referred to as smartphones. Most college Web sites are designed for big monitors and fast Internet connections, but those pages are often hard to navigate on smartphones. So MIT officials are now encouraging cellphone users to use the new mobile Web site, at m.mit.edu, when visiting the Web site from their phones.

MIT is not the only college to create mobile...

The big, long file-sharing case known as London-Sire v. Does 1-4 — for anonymous students at Boston University — isn’t going well for the music industry.

A federal judge in Massachusetts, Nancy Gertner, yesterday quashed the industry’s subpoenas seeking information about three of the many defendants in the case. The reason? “The university,” the court order said, “has adequately demonstrated that it is not able to identify the alleged infringers with a reasonable degree of technical certainty.”

Colleges and universities have taken different approaches to the recording industry’s anti-piracy campaign. But this victory — the...

Your book is finally out—congratulations. Good luck getting some ink from the ever-shrinking pool of review outlets.

If you happen to be an author affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, though, promoting that book just got a little bit easier. Late last month, the university’s Office of Public Affairs started ShelfLife@Texas, a new blog devoted to books by the university’s professors, alumni, and staffers.

The university had noticed “declining opportunities for coverage of faculty books in traditional media,” according to Jennifer McAndrew, a public-affairs specialist who edits the blog. Plus, “we’re constantly getting requests from alumni wanting to reconnect with the literary life at the university,” she said.

The blog seemed like a...

An article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education covers the digital divide and its effects on tribal colleges.

While mainstream colleges pour millions into technology, “tribal colleges are finding myriad hurdles — financial, technological, geographical and cultural — in their quests to become technologically relevant and thus appealing to increasingly tech-smart, if not savvy, students,” reports Reginald Stuart.

The article offers a picture of how some tribal colleges continue to struggle with providing access to computers and the Internet. Sometimes the problem is made more difficult by the architecture of the colleges — a college in Kansas, for example, was built with sturdy, cheap cinderblock that inhibits wireless signals. More often, the challenge...

Network outages can have a big impact on businesses that rely on the Internet (which is just about every business these days), but sometimes cable breaks or other problems can be hard to quickly isolate so they can be repaired. So researchers at Northwestern University set up a new system that borrows a page from brick-and-mortar neighborhood-watch programs to keep an eye out for network problems.

The researchers have asked users across the Internet to download a piece of software that looks for performance abnormalities on local networks and reports them back to a central repository. That allows an Internet-service company to look in on the system — called the Network Early Warning System, or NEWS — and detect any unusual concentrations of network-traffic problems that might indicate an area of the network that needs repair.

The system uses...

Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast discuss the future of library buildings on the latest edition of Tech Therapy. The Athenaeum, the new library at Goucher College that will feature not only books but treadmills, is the initial focus of the discussion. Libraries are increasingly all things to all people, and planning needs to reflect on that. “As you are planning library spaces, you need to find ways to bring nuance and agility into the conversation about what the library will become,” Scott says. “You need to stay away from saying the library will be all one thing or the other, or we’re going all electronic or going all paper, or whatever.”

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology created an interactive map of its unfinished campus.

Recruiting students and faculty members for a university whose campus is still under construction isn’t easy, even if the university has $10-billion at its disposal. So officials at Saudi Arabia’s new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology — known as Kaust — commissioned an interactive map that lets users click on icons and see images of the facilities that will be constructed.

The university, due to open next year, will offer...