http://jorgeledo.net/2008/11/europeana-en-abierto-y-en-beta/

Wenn man schon unangekündigt Besucher zu einer Vorbesichtigung reinlässt, sollte man vielleicht auch dranschreiben, was bis zur Eröffnung noch anders gemacht werden wird. Ich habe allerdings wenig Hoffnung, dass die technischen und inhaltlichen Probleme wirklich bewältigt sein werden. 

da hst du wohl recht, es ist als projekt extrem schwierig die verschiedensten metadaten der zahlreichen anbieter einzubinden, v.a. wenn man derart unter zeitdruck ist wie das europeana team. 

Nobody doubts that the ambitions of Europeana imply a huge task with metadata: we're talking about an impressive amount of diverse materials. But, at this point, I think they could have done a better work. We'll see what happens in the next months.

By the way, congratulations for the blog, I love it. 

See also
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/davies/

If Europeana isn't able to make a better job than OAIster (harvesting OAI-PMH meta-data grounded on Dublin Core) it's a waste of taxpayer's money. 

Thanks for the link. I completely agree with you. The problem is that a webarchive like Europeana would require not only to centralise all the items, but restructuring their semantic context. At present, it seems they opted for the easy way. I have to recognize that my expectations were way higher than what I found there —I had in mind wath they promise, actually—. This kind of projects really need to end up with good intentions and start to figure out, not optimistically, how much investment —and what kind of professionals— they need to get the job done.

The Ideas are out there:
http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/cio/odhfiles/Why.The.Digital.Humanities.pdf