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Europeana is intended to provide multilingual access to two million digitised books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the EU.

But within 24 hours the site has been dragged down by sheer weight of traffic. A message on the site reads: "The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour).

"We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December."

The website began to freeze almost immediately after launch. "It shows the huge interest of European users

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in this project," says a spokesman for EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding.

Europeana's director, Jill Cousins, says the new portal is not only Europe's answer to portals such as Google Book Search, but goes a step further.

"If you go onto Google, you don't always know what you're getting ... Here you do. The institutions have been here for hundreds of years and they know what they're talking about and that's what you're getting out of it," she claims.

Google has welcomed the EU initiative. "Digitisation projects like Europeana send a strong signal that authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies can work together to democratise access to the world's collective knowledge," says Santiago de la Mora, head of Google's book partnerships in Europe.

Last month Google agreed to pay $125 million (£84 million) in a legal settlement with authors and major publishers so that readers can browse millions of copyrighted books online.

Europeana, trying to avoid similar problems, will initially offer access mainly to items in the public domain. But the European Commission said it was in talks with cultural institutions, rights holders and technology firms about finding ways to add copyright material to its stock.

The online library plans to offer access to 10 million works by 2010.