Several digital libraries have extensive directories of the press on the Web, for example News, Media and Periodicals, maintained by the Michigan Electronic Library (MEL).
"More than 3,600 newspapers now publish on the Internet, but there are signs that the tide of growth may ebb", Eric K. Meyer stated when analyzing the presence of the newspapers on the Web in an article of AJR/NewsLink:
"A full 43% of all on-line newspapers now [end of 1997] are based outside theUnited States. A year ago, only 29% of on-line newspapers were located abroad.Rapid growth, primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Brazil andGermany, has pushed the total number of non-U.S. on-line newspapers to 1,563.The number of U.S. newspapers on-line also has grown markedly, from 745 a yearago to 1,290 six months ago to 2,059 today.
Outside the United States, the United Kingdom, with 294 on-line newspapers, and Canada, with 230, lead the way. In Canada, every province or territory now has at least one on-line newspaper. Ontario leads the way with 91, Alberta has 44, and British Columbia has 43.
Elsewhere in North America, Mexico has 51 on-line newspapers, 23 newspapers are on-line in Central America and 36 are on-line in the Caribbean. Europe is the next most wired continent for newspapers, with 728 on-line newspaper sites. After the United Kingdom, Norway has the next most - 53 - and Germany has 43. Asia (led by India) has 223 on-line newspapers, South America (led by Bolivia) has 161 and Africa (led by South Africa) has 53. Australia and other islands have 64 on-line newspapers."
The Web is the site of a collaborative effort between several companies in newspaper publishing. Opened between February 1997 and March 1998, NewsWorks was the common site of America's newspapers on-line maintained by New Century Network, a grouping of nine of the largest companies in newspaper publishing (Advance Publications; Cox Newspapers; The Gannett Company; The Hearst Corporation; Knight-Ridder Inc.; The New York Times Company; Times Mirror; The Tribune Company; The Washington Post Company), representing 140 titles. It was closed on March 10, 1998, because of dissension and a lack of cohesion between the partners. Even if this first partnership failed, the Web will probably foster some multinational and multilingual information services, and this will deeply change the habits brought by long-term traditional competition.
The electronic press is listed for example in E.Journal and the E-Zine-List.
E.Journal is the WWW Virtual Library electronic journals list. Provided by E-DOC (Electronic Publishing Solutions), it is the database of electronic journals, with the following categories: academic and reviewed journals; college or university; e-mail newsletters; magazines, newspapers; political; print magazines; publishing topics; business/finance; and other resources.
Updated monthly, the E-Zine-List is John Labovitz's list of electronic 'zines around the world, accessible via the Web, FTP, gopher, e-mail, and other services. 3,045 zines were listed on November 29, 1998. On the website, John Labovitz explains:
"What's an 'e-zine', anyway? For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, 'zine' is short for either 'fanzine' or 'magazine', depending on your point of view. Zines are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre, and/or esoteric. Zines are not 'mainstream' publications - they generally do not contain advertisements (except, sometimes, advertisements for other zines), are not targeted towards a mass audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit. An 'e-zine' is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic networks like the Internet. […]
I started this list in the summer of 1993. I was trying to find some place to publicize Crash, a print zine I'd recently made electronic versions of. All I could find was the alt.zines newsgroup and the archives at The WELL and ETEXT. I felt there was a need for something less ephemeral and more organized, a directory that kept track of where e-zines could be found. So I summarized the relevant info from a couple dozen e-zines and created the first version of this list.
Initially, I maintained the list by hand in a text editor; eventually, I wrote my own database program (in the Perl language) that automatically generates all the text, links, and files.
In the four years I've been publishing the list, the Net has changed dramatically, in style as well as scale. When I started the list, e-zines were usually a few kilobytes of plain text stored in the depths of an FTP server; high style was having a Gopher menu, and the Web was just a rumor of a myth. The number of living e-zines numbered in the low dozens, and nearly all of them were produced using the classic self-publishing method: scam resources from work when no one's looking.
Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e-zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and Gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even of asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'."
5.2. Future Trends for the On-Line Press
A new type of press has been born. In an article of the French daily newspaper Libération of March 21, 1997, Laurent Mauriac underlined the fact that February 28, 1997, was an important date in the history of press, journalism and the Internet. At 3.15 PM, one of the ten U.S. main daily newspapers, the Dallas Morning News, gave an exclusive on its website: Timothy McVeigh, the main suspect in the Oklahoma City bomb attack, just admitted he was guilty of this crime. Suddenly, the relationship between the on-line issue and the paper issue were inverted - for the first time, an exclusive piece of news was not given by a paper issue but by an on-line issue.
Less than one year later, the new mechanism was running fine. Pierre Briançon, another journalist of Libération, explained in an article of January 30, 1998, that the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal (about the sexual relationship between the president of the United States and a White House intern) was "the first main political event all the details of which are instantaneously reproduced on the Web". Most of the main media in the world were running a special web page or report on this matter. "For the first time, the Web appears as a direct and violent competitor, not only of newspapers - handicapped by their periodicity - but also of radios or televisions."
As these two examples show, the introduction of the Web in the press, and vice versa, created a new type of press on-line, which offers almost instantaneous information, or in any case much quicker than that given by TV and radio. The information can also be much more comprehensive thanks to the hyperlinks leading to other information sources and documents.
However, as was made clear particularly during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, cyberjournalists need a professional code of ethics. In an interview given to the German multimedia magazine Com! in March 1998, Hermann Meyn, president of the Federation of German Journalists (Deutscher Journalisten Verband - DJV) showed the necessity for such a code because the flood of information is much more rapid on the Internet than in the classic media, and rumors and false news spread much more quickly. National laws would not be enough to fight against this tendency on the Internet which is a worldwide computer network. A professional code of ethics for journalists would be much more effective.
Another important problem is the constant pressure exerted on journalists.During the ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997, BernieLunzer, Secretary-Treasurer of the Newspaper Guild, United States, stated:
"Our reporters have seen new deadline pressures build as the material is used throughout the day, not just at the end of the day. There is also a huge safety problem in the newsrooms themselves due to repetitive strain injuries. Some people are losing their careers at the age of 34 and 40 due to repetitive strain injuries, a problem that was unheard of in the age of the typewriter. But as people work 8- to 10-hour shifts without ever leaving their terminals, this has become an increasing problem."
Carlos Alberto de Almeida, president of the Federación Nacional de Periodistas (FENAJ) (National Federation of Professional Journalists), also denounced the exploitation of journalists:
"Technology offers the opportunity to rationalize work, to reduce working time and to encourage intellectual pursuits and even entertainment. But so far none of this has happened. On the contrary, media professionals - whether executives, journalists or others - are working longer and longer hours. If one were to rigorously observe the labour legislation and the rights of professionals, then the extraordinary positive aspects of these new technologies would emerge. This has not been the case in Brazil. Journalists can be easily phoned on weekends to do extra work without extra pay."
While it speeds up the production process, the automation of working methods, beginning with digitization, leads to a decrease in human intervention and consequently an increase in unemployment. Whereas previously, the production staff had to retype the texts of the editorial staff, computerized typesetting led to the combination of the two tasks of editing and composing. In advertising services too, graphic design and commercial tasks are now integrated.
As Etienne Reichel, Acting Director of VISCOM (Visual Communication),Switzerland, said:
"The work of 20 typesetters is now carried out by six qualified workers. There has also been a concentration of centres of production, thus placing enormous pressure on the small and medium-sized enterprises which are traditional sources of employment. […] Computer science makes it possible for experts to become independent producers. Approximately 30 per cent of employees have set up independently and have been able to carve out part of the market."
Although on-line services create some new jobs, as directors of organizations of newspaper publishers often claim, the unions have also stated that the number of job creations is much lower than the number of dismissals.
Even if the Internet is a huge information tank, the press will always need journalists, as explained by Jean-Pierre Cloutier, editor of the Chroniques de Cybérie, in an article of WebdoMag of July 1998:
"Some people predicted the short-term disappearance of the traditional media and their creators. 'We won't need journalists any more when a good browser for News groups is available', Michael Hauben of Columbia University warned two years ago. 'The more people there are on-line, the more marginalized the professional information media will be.' This is rubbish.
The spirit of discovery and the taste for exploration and technical experimentation of those who were early in adopting the Internet (the ones that the sociologists of the Net call the early doers) are not shared by the second wave of users who now make up the largest part of this 'critical mass'.
And that is the challenge for the specialized press - to accompany the public in its discovery of the new medium and in its appropriation of cyberspace, help people to analyze, facilitate their understanding, add value to raw information."
Moreover, with the Internet, it is possible to read on-line titles which are difficult to find in newsstands, like the Algerian daily newspaper El Watan, on-line since October 1997. When interviewed by the French daily newspaper Le Monde of March 23, 1998, Redha Belkhat, chief editor, told: "For the Algerian diaspora, to find in a newsstand of London, New York, or Ottawa an issue of El Watan less than a week old is an achievement. Now the newspaper is here at 6 AM, and at noon it is on the Internet."
Forbidden newspapers can also continue on-line thanks to the Internet, such as the independent Algerian daily La Nation (The Nation). Because it was denouncing the violation of human rights in Algeria, it had to stop its activities in December 1996. One year later, a special issue was available on the site of Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders) for the first anniversary of its disappearance. Malti Djallan, who is at the origin of this Reporters sans frontières initiative, explained: "By putting La Nation on-line, our goal was to say: it no longer makes sense to censor the newspapers in Algeria, because thanks to the Internet people can retrieve the articles, print them, and spread them out around."
Nouvelles du bled (News of the Village) is an electronic newspaper created inDecember 1997 by Christian Debraisne, who is French, and Mohamed Zaoui, anAlgerian journalist in exile. The team includes about twelve persons who meet onThursday evenings in a Parisian café. When interviewed in Le Monde of March 23,1998, Christian Debraisne, who is responsible for the composition, explained:
"With the Internet, we found a space for free expression and, as a bonus, there were no printing and distribution problems. I get all the articles and I put them on-line during the night from my house."
The press review is prepared using the newspapers of Algiers, Algeria. In the same article, Mohamed Zaoui explained:
"The editorial staff of El Watan, for example, sends us articles which cannot be published there. It is a way to confound censorship. I wanted to be useful and I thought that my role as a journalist was to seize the opportunity the Internet was offering to air opinions other than the Algerian government's and the fundamentalists'."
The press now has to confront all the Internet's resources:
- instant access to many information servers;
- speed in information dissemination;
- development of main photographic archives;
- gigantic documentation capacity (geographical maps, biographical notes, official texts, political and economic documents, audiovisual and video documents, etc.) going from the general to the specialized and vice versa;
- links to all these information sources and other articles on the same topic; and
- archives equipped with a search engine allowing the retrieval of articles by date, author, title, subject, etc.
Because of these resources, the Internet brings in-depth information that no other media could bring so easily. Daily information is supported by a whole encyclopedia which helps to understand it.
Even if audiovisual and video techniques are more and more present in theon-line press, the most important thing is still its content, as Jean-PierreCloutier, the editor of the Chroniques de Cybérie, reminded us in his e-mail ofJune 8, 1998:
"For the Chroniques de Cybérie, we could launch and maintain a formula because of the relatively low entry costs in this medium. However, everything will depend on the scope of the phenomenon called media 'convergence' and a possible rise of production costs if we need to offer audio and video products to stay competitive. If that is the case, we will have to think over strategic partnerships, a little like the one linking us to the group Ringier which permitted the re-launching of the Chroniques after six months of inactivity. But whatever the degree of convergence is, I think there will always be room for written work, and also for in-depth analysis on the main questions."
[In this chapter:]
[6.1. European and World Directories for Libraries / 6.2. The Internet in Libraries]
This chapter focuses on traditional libraries, with librarians, walls, books and periodicals lined up on shelves, and tables and chairs for the readers. The next chapter will focus on digital libraries.
6.1. European and World Directories for Libraries
The first library website was that of the Helsinki City Library, Finland, which opened in February 1994.
A trilingual English-French-German site, Gabriel (acronym for Gateway and Bridgeto Europe's National Libraries) is the World Wide Web service for Europe'sNational Libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians(CENL).
"Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest theoretical works about libraries in any European language and provides a blueprint for the great modern research library. The name Gabriel is common to many European languages and is derived from the Old Testament, where Gabriel appears as one of the archangels or heavenly messengers. He also appears in a similar role in the New Testament and the Qu'ran."
There are currently 38 national libraries from the member states of the Councilof Europe participating in CENL and Gabriel (Albania, Austria, Belgium,Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany,Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania,Luxembourg, (Former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, Malta, The Netherlands,Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia,Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vatican City).
During the 1994 Oslo meeting of the Conference of European National Libraries, it was suggested that national libraries should have an electronic noticeboard available to one another as a means of keeping up-to-date with current activities. An ad hoc meeting was held in The Hague, Netherlands, on March 27, 1995, at which representatives of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, British Library and Helsinki University Library met to discuss the proposed CENL WWW. Objectives were set out at the meeting and an action schedule agreed. These three libraries set up the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries agreed to participate in the pilot project: Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Biblioteka Narodowa (Poland). Working together, these libraries created a functional pilot service based on entries describing their own services and collections between March and September 1995. The pilot service was endorsed by the CENL annual meeting at Bern in Switzerland in September 1995 and launched on the Internet. The service was then mounted and maintained in London by British Library Network Services and was mirrored in The Hague, Netherlands, and Helsinki, Finland.
A second stage in the project was initiated on behalf of CENL in October 1995. The project was hosted by the British Library in London. In November 1995, national libraries that had not participated in the Gabriel pilot project were invited to submit their entries. Using the pilot as a basis, this development project aimed to achieve comprehensive coverage of European national libraries within Gabriel. During the life of the project, the numbers of CENL member libraries with their own WWW servers had increased quite rapidly. Every participating library assigned staff members to act as contact persons for Gabriel. This project ended in September 1996. As content and publicity built up, and the numbers of linking sites expanded, measurable usage of the Gabriel service had increased rapidly.
During the CENL meeting in September 1996 in Lisbon, the CENL members decided that Gabriel should be launched as an official service of CENL on behalf of Europe's national libraries on January 1, 1997. The editorial maintenance of Gabriel was taken over by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. The site is now mirrored from the websites of five national libraries in The Hague (The Netherlands), London (United Kingdom), Helsinki (Finland), Frankfort (Germany), and Ljubljana (Slovenia).
Updated in December 11, 1998, the introduction of Internet and the LibrarySphere: Further progress for European Libraries specifies:
"Public libraries have now established a presence on the Web which compares well with the networked services which have been available for some time from academic libraries and national libraries. Services include sophisticated catalogue access for their users as well as links to other items of interest (local services, general reference, distance education, external resources). While it is difficult to keep track of developments, there are now probably some 1,000 public libraries from at least 26 European countries on the Web. This trend can be expected to continue as most countries now have firm plans in support of libraries in the Information Society.
There is, of course, a vast amount of networked information on libraries, initially from North American sources but now increasingly from Europe and the rest of the world. Not only have sites been created for most of our 99 EU projects, but the eLib projects in the UK and some of the Autoroutes de l'Information [information highways] projects in France have contributed significantly. And last but not least, concerted efforts in the area of public libraries, have added a wealth of accessible resources in a wide variety of languages."
As for the 1,000 public libraries in 26 European countries, the leaders are Finland (247), Sweden (132), the United Kingdom (112), Denmark (107), Germany (102), the Netherlands (72), Lithuania (51), Spain (56), and Norway (45). Newcomers are the Czech Republic (29) and Portugal (3). Russia maintains on the Web a list of public reference libraries with 26 names. Sites vary significantly between rudimentary information on addresses and opening hours to full access to OPACs (on-line public access catalogs) and/or to a variety of local and external services.
Compiled by Sheila and Robert Harden, Public Libraries of Europe is a country-by-country listing of European public libraries on the Web.
I'm Europe, the site of the European Union, has a section General Library Resources on the Web, with the following contents: library indexes; general library resources; public library information; individual public libraries; publishers and the book trade; other EU projects; and other sites of interest.
Library and Related Resources is maintained by Ian Tilsed on the site of the Library and Information Service of the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. It comprises: library information servers; library catalogues; library and information science resources; library and related organizations; library projects, reports, bibliographies and documentation; library related e-mail lists and e-journals; LIS (library and information science) training & professional development; museums; publishers and newspapers; scholarly societies; indexes and bibliographic information sources; frequently asked questions (FAQ) files; and web indexes and lists.
The Library of Congress's section Library and Information Science Resources provides links to: general resources; national libraries; state libraries; school library resources; library home pages; on-line catalogs; research and reference; technical services; special collections; digital libraries; professional organizations; library and information science schools; professional journals; library vendors; and library conferences.
Compiled by the Berkeley Digital Library (California, USA), LibWeb: Library Servers via WWW currently lists 2,500 web pages from libraries over 70 countries (as of December 10, 1998), with a daily update. The search is available by location, library type or library name.
6.2. The Internet in Libraries
The Libraries Programme of the European Union "aims to help increase the ready availability of library resources across Europe and to facilitate their interconnection with the information and communications infrastructure. Its two main orientations will be the development of advanced systems to facilitate user access to library resources, and the interconnection of libraries with other libraries and the developing "information highway". Validation tests will be accompanied by measures to promote standards, disseminate results and raise the awareness of library staff about the possibilities afforded by telematics systems."
Many libraries are developing a digital library alongside their other collections. Digital libraries gather mainly texts, and sometimes images and sounds as well. They allow a large audience to have access to documents belonging to specialized, old, local or regional collections, which were previously difficult to access for various reasons, including: concern for preservation of rare and fragile documents, reduced opening hours, forms to fill out, long waiting period to get the document, and shortage of staff. All these reasons were hurdles to get over and required of the researcher an unfailing patience and an out-of-the-ordinary determination to finally get to the document.
Beowulf, the first great English literary masterpiece, is a treasure of the British Library. It is known only from a single 11th century manuscript, which was badly damaged by fire in 1731. Transcriptions made in the late 18th century show that many hundreds of words and letters then visible along the charred edges subsequently crumbled away. To halt this process each leaf was mounted in a paper frame in 1845. Scholarly discussion of the date, provenance and creation of the poem continue around the world, and researchers regularly require access to the manuscript. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for study not only raises conservation issues, it also makes it unavailable for the many visitors who come to the Library expecting to see this most fundamental of literary treasures on display. Digitization of the whole manuscript offered a solution to these problems, as well as providing new opportunities for insight.
The Electronic Beowulf Project has assembled a huge database of digital images of the Beowulf manuscript and related manuscripts and printed texts. The archive already includes fiber-optic readings of hidden letters and ultraviolet readings of erased text in the early 11th-century manuscript; full electronic facsimiles of the 18th-century transcripts of the manuscript; and selections from important 19th-century collations, editions, and translations. Major additions will include images of contemporary manuscript illuminations and material culture, and links with the Toronto Dictionary of Old English project and with the comprehensive Anglo-Saxon bibliographies of the Old English Newsletter.
The project has been developed by the British Library with two leading American Anglo-Saxon experts, Kevin Kiernan of the University of Kentucky and Paul Szarmach of the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. Professor Kiernan is editing the electronic archive and is producing a CD-ROM electronic facsimile that will bring together in an easy-to-use package all the different types of images being collected.
As Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, explains on the website:
"The Beowulf manuscript is a unique treasure and imposes on the Library a responsibility to scholars throughout the world. Digital photography offered for the first time the possibility of recording text concealed by early repairs, and a less expensive and safer way of recording readings under special light conditions. It also offers the prospect of using image enhancement technology to settle doubtful readings in the text. Network technology has facilitated direct collaboration with American scholars and makes it possible for scholars around the world to share in these discoveries. Curatorial and computing staff learned a great deal which will inform any future programmes of digitisation and network service provision the Library may undertake, and our publishing department is considering the publication of an electronic scholarly edition of Beowulf. This work has not only advanced scholarship; it has also captured the imagination of a wider public, engaging people (through press reports and the availability over computer networks of selected images and text) in the appreciation of one of the primary artefacts of our shared cultural heritage."
Thanks to the digital library, the "traditional" library can finally join two goals which used to be in contradiction - document preservation and document communication. On the one hand, the documents are taken out of their shelves only once to be scanned. On the other, the public can access them from the screen, and easily go from one document to another, without a long waiting period or the need to fill out forms.
The UNOG (United Nations of Geneva) Library, a leading European center for the study of world affairs, is open to UN staff, scholars, researchers, diplomats, journalists, and students. Its outstanding collections are especially strong on disarmament, economics, human rights, international law and current events. On July 3, 1997, the UNOG Library inaugurated its new Cyberspace. Initiated by Pierre Pelou, the Head of the Library, this electronic forum is primarily intended to benefit representatives of the Permanent Missions, conference delegations and international civil servants. It is also open to specialized researchers, students, engineers and other interested professionals.
Designed and planned by Antonio Bustamante, architect and Head of the Buildings,Parks and Gardens Unit, the cyberspace is comprised of 24 computerizedworkstations that have been installed on the redesigned first floor of the UNOGLibrary to provide the following services:
a) Access to a broad range of electronic resources, such as: the Internet; the United Nations Optical Disk System; an infoserver with about 50 networked CD-ROMs; the United Nations Bibliographical Information System (UNBIS), the shared database of the Headquarters Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the UNOG Library; the UNOG Library's automated catalogue; Profound, a collection of databases in the business and economics field; and the catalogue of RERO (Réseau des bibliothèques romandes et tessinoises), a network of Swiss libraries with which the UNOG Library is affiliated;
b) Consultation of a selection of multimedia CD-ROMs composed of intertwined audio, textual, photographic and video segments (e.g. Encarta 97, dictionaries and encyclopedias, l'État du monde, Élysée 2, Nuklear);
Viewing of multistandard videocassettes and DVDs (digital versatile disks) of documentaries and films on topics of international relevance (e.g. humanitarian affairs, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi);
Usage of computerized working tools for text-processing (WordPerfect) and electronic mail (e-mail, cc:mail); and
Access to the Internet, particularly the UNOG homepages in English and French, the homepages of Permanent Missions and other international organizations, and a selection of links provided by the managers of the UNOG Cyberspace.
A second cyberspace with six computers opened in April 1998 on the second floor of the library, with the same facilities and a fantastic view on the Lake of Geneva and the surrounding Alps.
The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization based in Paris, has been quick to put the Internet at its staff's disposal, and to create on extensive Intranet. Peter Raggett, Deputy-Head of the OECD Main Library, made the following comments in his e-mail of June 18, 1998:
"The Internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the 'information overload' been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the Internet. Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on the Internet.
When one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. These search mechanisms work well if one is searching for something very precise, such as information on a person who has an unusual name, but they produce a confusing number of references if one is searching for a topic which can be quite broad. Try and search the Web for Russia AND transport to find statistics on the use of trains, planes and buses in Russia. The first references you will find are freight-forwarding firms who have business connections with Russia.
At the OECD Library we have collected together several hundred World Wide Web sites and have put links to them on the OECD Intranet. They are sorted by subject and each site has a short annotation giving some information about it. The researcher can then see if it is possible that the site contains the desired information. This is adding value to the site references and in this way the Central Library has built up a virtual reference desk on the OECD network. As well as the annotated links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and websites relevant to several projects currently being researched at the OECD, network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new acquisitions. The Library catalogue will soon be available for searching on the Intranet.
The reference staff at the OECD Library uses the Internet for a good deal of their work. Often an academic working paper will be on the Web and will be available for full-text downloading. We are currently investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the Internet.
The Internet is impinging on many peoples' lives and Information Managers are the best people to help researchers around the labyrinth. The Internet is just in its infancy and we are all going to be witnesses to its growth and refinement."
The Internet in libraries is a research topic dealt with by numerous organizations, for example the Internet Public Library (IPL) or the International Federation of Library Institutions and Associations (IFLA).
Opened in March 1995, the Internet Public Library (IPL) is the first digital public library of and for the Internet community. Its different sections are: reference; exhibits; especially for librarians; magazines and serials; newspapers; on-line texts; and Web searching. There are also sections for Teen and Youth. All the items of the collections (20,166 as of December 8, 1998) are carefully selected, catalogued and described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library, IPL also tries to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)is a worldwide, independent organization created to provide librarians around the world with a forum for exchanging ideas, promoting international cooperation, research and development in all fields of library activity. IFLA's objectives are: to represent librarianship in matters of international interest; to promote the continuing education of library personnel; and to develop, maintain and promote guidelines for library services. The part relating to Electronic Collections and Services includes four sections: library and information science; digital libraries; information policy; and Internet and networking.
A number of professional magazines are available on the Web.
Library Journal Digital (LJ Digital) is an electronic offshoot of Library Journal (LJ), founded in 1876 and the oldest U.S. independent national library publication. LJ is read by over 100,000 library directors, administrators, and others in public, academic, and special (e.g., business) libraries. Published 20 times a year, LJ combines news, features, and commentary with analyses of public policy, technology, and management developments. In addition, some 7,500 evaluative reviews (of books, audio and video, CD-ROMs, websites, and magazines) written by librarians help readers make their purchasing decisions. Each issue reviews 250 to 350 adult books, mostly prior to publication, making it a source for librarians and publishers' early evaluations.
Published by the University of Houston Libraries, Texas, the Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review) is an electronic journal about end-user computer systems in libraries. It is distributed at no charge on the Internet and other computer networks to 8,000 persons in 60 countries. The journal publishes papers on topics such as digital libraries, document delivery systems, electronic publishing, expert systems, hypermedia and multimedia systems, locally mounted databases, network-based information resources and tools, and on-line catalogs.
The librarian's job has significantly changed with computers, and continues to change with the Internet. Computers made the catalogs much easier to handle. In place of all these paper cards to be classified into wood or metal drawers, the computer could sort out the bibliographic records itself. The loan of documents and the processing of orders became computerized too. Then networking computers allowed the creation of union catalogs for a region, a country, or a specific topic, furthering interlibrary loan.
What does the Internet bring to librarians, libraries and library users? It brings:
- the use of electronic mail for internal and external communications, and as a means of communication with the public;
- the participation in newsgroups and discussion forums;
- the use of the library website to give additional information, open a digital library, and offer a selection of sites relating to the public's topics;
- free access to the library's catalogues;
- a gigantic information provider; and
- a simpler way to look for another job.
With the Internet as a main information provider and the quick development of digital libraries, what is the future of librarians? Will they become cyberlibrarians, or will they disappear because the public will not need them any more when all the information and documents they need will be available on-line?
As for journalists, the librarians will probably continue being useful, as stated by Peter Raggett, Deputy-Head of the OECD Library, in his e-mail of September 18, 1998:
"I have to filter the information for my clients. This means that I must be familiar with the sites which contain useful links. In addition I expect that there will be an expansion in Internet use for education and research. This means that libraries will have to create Virtual Libraries where students can follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the world. Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a 'Virtual Librarian'. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will contact me by e-mail, telephone or fax and I will do the research and send them the results electronically."
[In this chapter:]
[7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition / 7.2. Digital Libraries: Some Examples / 7.3. Digital Image Collections / 7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries]
7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition
Digital libraries may be the major contribution from the print media to theInternet, and vice versa.
Thanks to the Internet, hundreds of public works, literary and scientific documents, articles, academic and research works, pictures and sound tracks are available on the screen for free. The collections of existing digital libraries increase regularly, and new digital libraries come up constantly.
Some digital libraries are created by "traditional" libraries who want to put their documents at the disposal of Internet users. Other digital libraries are "only" digital - their life is 100% on the Web.
Hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Universal Library defines the digital library as "a digital library of digital documents, artifacts, and records. The advantage of having library material available in digital form is threefold: (1) the content occupies less space and can be replicated and made secure electronically, (2) the content can be made immediately available over the Internet to anyone, anywhere, and (3) search for content can be automated. The promise of the digital library is the promise of great cost reductions while providing great increases in archive availability and accessibility. […]
There are literally thousands of digital library initiatives of a great many varieties going on in the world today. Digital libraries are being formed of scholarly works, archives of historical figures and events, corporate and governmental records, museum collections and religious collections. Some take the form of scanning and putting documents to the World Wide Web. Still other digital libraries are formed of digitizing paintings, films and music. Work even exists in 3D reconstructive digitization that permits a digital deconstruction, storage, transmission, and reconstruction of solid object."
The British Library is a pioneer in Europe for research relating to digital libraries. Some treasures of the library are already on-line: Beowulf, the first great English masterpiece dated 11th century; Magna Carta, one example from 1215 issued over the Great Seal of King John; the Lindisfarne Gospels, dated 698; the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, which is the world's earliest printed book; the Sforza Hours, dated 1490-1520, which is an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the Codex Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), and the Tyndale New Testament, which was the first printed New Testament in English, from the press of Peter Schoeffer in Worms.
Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, states on the BritishLibrary website:
"We do not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the future. Others anticipate that the impact will be slight. In the context of the British Library, printed books, manuscripts, maps, music, sound recordings and all the other existing materials in the collection will always retain their central importance, and we are committed to continuing to provide, and to improve, access to these in our reading rooms. The importance of digital materials will, however, increase. We recognize that network infrastructure is at present most strongly developed in the higher education sector, but there are signs that similar facilities will also be available elsewhere, particularly in the industrial and commercial sector, and for public libraries. Our vision of network access encompasses all these."
The Digital Library Programme will begin in February 1999. The two potential partners are: Dawson-IBM-The Stationery Office Consortium, and the Digital Library Consortium (Blackwell, Chadwyck-Healey, MicroPatent, Unisys). The confirmation of the preferred bidder is planned for February 1999, and the contract will be awarded in Spring 1999.
"The development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to the collection will become boundless with users from all over the world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials using computer networks, particularly the Internet."
What exactly is digitization? Digitization is the conversion of text, sound or images to digital form, that is, in the form of numerical digits (bits and bytes) for handling by computer. Digitization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without separate material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs, rather than simply books and records.
7.2. Digital Libraries: Some Examples
Created by Michael S. Hart in 1971, the Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the Internet. It is now the oldest digital library on the Web, and the biggest in terms of the number of works (1,500) which have been digitized for it, with around 45 new titles per month. Michael Hart's purpose is to put on the Web as many literary texts as possible for a minimal price.
In his e-mail of August 23, 1998, Michael Hart explained:
"We consider Etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to Etexts, especially in schools. […] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 Etexts on the Net, and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average Etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%… thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 Etexts to 1,000 time as many… a trillion and a quadrillion in US terminology."
The Etext # 1000 was Dante's Divine Comedy, in both English and Italian, and Michael Hart dreams about Etext # 2000 for January 1st, 2000. In the Project Gutenberg Newsletter of February 1998, he wrote: "If we do 36 per month for the next 23 month period, we should be able to reach 2,000 Etexts by January 1 of the year 2000. . . […] I think it would be kind of nice to do our 2,000th Etext during the big celebration…"
An average of 50 hours is necessary to get any Etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright-searched, analyzed, etc.
How did Project Gutenberg begin?
Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of "normal computing", that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given… so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. He immediately announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. He then proceeded to type in the Declaration of Independence and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. Project Gutenberg was born.
There are three sections in the Project Gutenberg, basically described as:
- Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass,Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.;
- Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare,Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.; and
- References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.
"The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an Etext to Peter Pan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg Etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Kahn; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries.
We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy to find Etext format.
With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire library, without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program. In fact, these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain that you can do a search on them without even using an intermediate search program (i.e. a program between you and the disk). Norton's and other direct disk access programs can search every one of your files without you even naming them, pointing to an Etext directory, or whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk. . .I do this on a half gigabyte disk partition, containing all our editions."
In this same spirit, Project Gutenberg selects Etexts that large portions of the audience will want and use frequently. It has also avoided requests, demands, and pressures to create authoritative editions.
"We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release Etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level, before the end of the year 2001, when we are scheduled to complete our 10,000 book Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library."
"Anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely." The Project Gutenberg Philosophy uses this premise to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as 'Plain Vanilla ASCII', meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files." Plain Vanilla ASCII thus addresses the audience with Apples and Ataris all the way to the old homebrew Z80 computers, not to mention the audience of Mac, UNIX and mainframers. Michael Hart explains:
"When we started, the files had to be very small …. So doing the U.S. Declaration of Independence (only 5K) seemed the best place to start. This was followed by the Bill of Rights - then the whole U.S. Constitution, as space was getting large (at least by the standards of 1973). Then came the Bible, as individual books of the Bible were not that large, then Shakespeare (a play at a time), and then into general work in the areas of light and heavy literature and references…By the time Project Gutenberg got famous, the standard was 360K disks, so we did books such as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan because they could fit on one disk. Now 1.44 is the standard disk and ZIP is the standard compression; the practical file size is about three million characters, more than long enough for the average book.
However, pictures are still so bulky to store on disk that it will still be a while before we include even the lowres Tenniel illustrations in Alice and Looking-Glass. However we are very interested in doing them, and are only waiting for advances in technology to release a test edition. The market will have to establish some standards for graphics, however, before we can attempt to reach general audiences, at least on the graphics level."
The On-Line Books Page is a directory of books that can be freely read right on the Internet. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who remains the editor of the pages. It includes: an index of more than 7,000 on-line books on the Internet, which can be browsed by author, by title or by subject; pointers to significant directories and archives of on-line texts; and special exhibits. From the main search page, users have options to search for four types of media: books, music, art, and video.
"Along with books, The On-Line Books Page is also now listing major archives of serials (such as magazines, published journals, and newspapers), as of June 1998. Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a 'books page', back issues of serials are often bound and reissued as hardbound 'books'.)"
Web space and computing resources are provided by the School of Computer Scienceat Carnegie Mellon University. The On-Line Books Page participates in theExperimental Search System of the Library of Congress. It works with TheUniversal Library Project, also hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.
In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, John Mark Ockerbloom explained how the site began:
"I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993. The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put on-line by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made Web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)
After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books on-line, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the Net. So that's how my index got started.
I eventually gave up the Webmaster job in 1996, but kept The On-Line Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the Net had for making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many books going on-line that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my on-line books works in some form or another."
In his e-mail of September 1, 1998, he explained the way he sees the relationship between the print media and the Internet:
"I certainly find both the print media and the Internet very useful, and am very excited about the potential of the Internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the Net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer."
Created by the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, theUniversal Library Project is chaired by Raj Raddy. According to the website:
"The mission of the Universal Library Project is to start a worldwide movement to make available on the Internet all the Authored Works of Mankind so that anyone can access these works from any place at any time. This is a major new initiative in digital libraries that will build a technically realistic and economically practical infrastructure for putting and accessing library documents on the World Wide Web. In this regard, access to the Universal Library would be free and have the same stated goal as the Carnegie Library of the last century.
[It] has a vision that goes beyond the scope of most other digital library projects. Simply put, our goal is to spark a lasting movement, in which all of the institutions responsible for the collection of mankind's works will place these works on the Internet to educate and inspire all of the world's people. Our project will, therefore, serve as an umbrella over all of these efforts, with common indices, guidelines, and systems that allow the quickest, simplest access possible."
In summer 1998, The Universal Library was working on the Book Object project:
"The Universal Library Book Object is intended to let you read a book off the web the way you would like to read it, by giving you book presentation options. You can either download the whole book as a single HTML or ASCII MIME object. Download by the screen-full. Download by the section or chapter. You can have the book in HTML, in ASCII, in Postscript, in RTF, or image GIF. In short, you don't have to read the book in the same form in which it is stored on the remote server. Such conversion of original presentation format is already common in printer drivers, although we also provide a means to permission use.
To complement the users' freedom to read the book in the form in which they desire to read it, the Book Object also has complementary provisions by which a book owner can control or restrain the freedoms allowed. This includes not only presentation constraints, but also permission to print or permission that may require monetary payments. The Universal Library Book Object is still a work in progress, but we have now overcome a few of the more fundamental hurdles in establishing the question of its feasibility."
Founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, The ETEXT Archives are home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to the personal. Their duty is to provide electronic versions of texts without judging their content.
The contents are:
- E-zines: electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal;
- Politics: political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups;
- Fiction: publications of amateur authors;
- Religion: mainstream and off-beat religious texts;
- Poetry: an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and
- Quartz: the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.
The ETEXT Archives were founded in the Summer of 1992 by Paul Southworth, and hosted by the User Services Department of the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division.
"The Web was just a glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was still the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast majority of users. The origin of the project has caused numerous people to associate it with the University of Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official relationship and the project is supported entirely by volunteer labor and contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the project maintainers.
The project was started in response to the lack of organized archiving of political documents, periodicals and discussions disseminated via Usenet on newsgroups such as alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came later and was also a substantial source of both materials and regular contributors.
Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines (e-zines) began their rapid proliferation on the Internet, and it was clear that these materials suffered from the same lack of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the fact that the lines between e-zines (which at the time were mostly related to hacking, phreaking, and Internet anarchism) and political materials on the Internet were fuzzy enough that most e-zines fit the original mission of The ETEXT Archives. One thing led to another, and e-zines of all kinds — many on various cultural topics unrelated to politics — invaded the archives in significant volume."
The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word multilingual library with a massive database (325,916,827 words as of December 10, 1998) containing multilingual novels, technical literature and translated texts.
Logos, an international translation company based in Modena, Italy, gives free access to the linguistic tools used by its translators: 200 translators at its headquarters and 2,500 translators on-line all over the world, who process around 200 texts per day. Apart from the Logos Wordtheque, the tools include the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 entry words (as of December 10, 1998); Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Universal Conjugator, a database for conjugation of verbs in 17 languages.
When interviewed by Annie Kahn in the French daily newspaper Le Monde ofDecember 7, 1997, Rodrigo Vergara, the Head of Logos, explained:
"We wanted all our translators to have access to the same translation tools. So we made them available on the Internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also gave us a lot of exposure. The operation has in fact attracted a great number of customers, but also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to the contacts made in the wake of the initiative."
In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote:
"The Logos site is much more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other on-line dictionaries. A system cornerstone is the document search software, which processes a corpus of literary texts available free of charge on the Web. If you search for the definition or the translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get not only the answer sought, but also a quote from one of the literary works containing the word (in our case, an essay by Voltaire). All it takes is a click on the mouse button to access the whole text or even to order the book, thanks to a partnership agreement with Amazon.com, the famous on-line book shop. Foreign translations are also available. If however no text containing the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending the user to other websites concerning the term in question. In the case of certain words, you can even hear the pronunciation. If there is no translation currently available, the system calls on the public to contribute. Everyone can make their own suggestion, after which Logos translators and the company verify the translations forwarded."
Begun in 1997, Gallica is a massive undertaking by the Bibliothèque nationale deFrance to digitize thousands of texts and images relating to French history,life and culture. The first step of the program - the pictures and the texts ofFrench 19th century - is now available on the Web.
Many organizations have a digital library organized around a subject. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information on-line, as well as to promote responsibility in new media, run the EFF Archives, with documents on civil liberties.
Are there only English texts on the Web? Not any longer - what was true at the beginning of the Internet, when it was a network created in the US before becoming worldwide, is not true any more. More and more digital libraries are offering texts in languages other than English.
Project Gutenberg is now developing its foreign collections, as announced in theProject Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997. In the Newsletter of March 1998,Michael Hart, its founder and executive director, mentioned that ProjectGutenberg's volunteers were now working on Etexts in French, German, Portugueseand Spanish, and he was also expecting to have some coming in the followinglanguages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian,Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak,Slovene, and Valencian (Catalan).
Founded in 1993, the ABU: la bibliothèque universelle (ABU: The Universal Library) offers a collection of French-language texts of public domain. It gives free access to 223 texts and 76 authors (as of November 1998).
Located on the site of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, Athena is a digital library of documents in several languages about philosophy, science, classics, literature, history, economics, etc. It also focuses on putting French texts at the disposal of the Internet community. The Helvetia section gathers documents about Switzerland. The site offers links to other digital libraries.
The Bielefeld University Library (Bibliothek der Universität Bielefeld), Germany, is a collection of German digitized texts. Michael Behrens, responsible for the digital library, answered to my questions in his e-mail of September 25, 1998.
ML: "When did you begin your digital library?"
MB: "[It] depends on what the term would be understood to mean. To some here, 'digital library' seems to be everything that, even remotely, has to do with the Internet. The library started its own web server some time in summer 1995. There's no exact date to give because it took some time until we got it to work in a reasonably reliable way. Before that, it had been offering most of its services via Telnet, which wasn't used much by patrons, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material from home. But in those days almost nobody really had Internet access at home… We started digitizing rare prints from our own library, and some that were sent in via library loan, in November 1996."
ML: "How many digitized texts do you have?"
MB: "In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting Nov. 1997 and ending June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned as image files and made available via the Web. During the same time, there were also a few digital materials prepared as accompanying material for lectures held at the university (image files as excerpts from printed works). These are, for copyright reasons, not available outside of campus. The next step, which is just being completed, is the digitization of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a German periodical from the Enlightenment, comprising 58 volumes, 2,574 articles on 30,626 pages.
A somewhat bigger digitization project of German periodicals from the 18th and early 19th century is planned. The size will be about 1,000,000 pages. These periodicals will be not just from the holdings of this library, but the project would be coordinated here, and some of the technical would be done here, also."
Projekt Gutenberg-DE is a German digital library created in 1994 because there were very few German texts on the Web. Texts are organized for reading on-line with longer works divided into chapters. There is an alphabetic list of authors, with for each a biography and a list of works, and a full text search for titles.
In Italy, Liber Liber, whose maxim is: "Nullus amicus magis liber quam liber", is a non-profit cultural association whose aim is the promotion of any kind of artistic and intellectual expression. In particular, it is an attempt to draw humanistic and scientific culture together thanks to the qualified use of computer technologies in the humanistic field.
Liber Liber promotes the Manuzio project (projetto Manuzio), a collection ofelectronic texts in Italian which was renamed after the famous publisher fromVenice who in the 16th century improved the printing techniques created byGutenberg.
The Manuzio project has the ambition to make a noble idea real: the idea of making culture available to everybody. How? By making books, graduation theses, articles, tales or any other document which can be memorized by a computer available all over the world, at any minute and free-of-charge. Via modem, or using floppy disks (in which case there is only the cost of the disk and the delivery), it is already possible to get hundreds of books. And Projetto Manuzio needs only a few people to make such a masterpiece as Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia available to millions of people.
Created by the University of Virginia and the University of Pittsburgh, the Japanese Text Initiative (JTI) is a collaborative effort to make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web. The goal of the Japanese Text Initiative (JTI) is "to put on-line on the Web texts of classical Japanese literature in Japanese characters. Our primary audience is English-speaking scholars and students. Where possible, the Japanese texts will be accompanied by English translations. All JTI texts will be tagged in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards, and converted to HTML for display on the Web. An important purpose is to make JTI texts in both Japanese and English searchable, both individually and as a group." Venezuela Analítica, an electronic magazine, conceived as a public forum to exchange ideas on politics, economics, culture, science and technology, created in May 1997 BitBlioteca, a digital library which comprises about 700 texts mainly in Spanish, and also in French, English and Portuguese.
In his e-mail of September 3, 1998, Roberto Hernández Montoya, Head of BitBlioteca, explains the way he sees the relationship between the print media and the Internet:
"The printed text can't be replaced, at least not for the foreseeable future. The paper book is a tremendous 'machine'. We can't leaf through an electronic book in the same way as a paper book. On the other hand electronic use allows us to locate text chains more quickly. In a certain way we can more intensively read the electronic text, even with the inconvenience of reading on the screen. The electronic book is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (if we don't count the cost of the computer and the Internet connection).
[The use of the Internet] has been very important for me personally. It became my main way of life. As an organization it gave us the possibility to communicate with thousands of people, which would have been economically impossible if we had published a paper magazine. I think the Internet is going to become the essential means of communication and of information exchange in the coming years."