From the Print Media to the Internet by Marie Lebert (mobile ebook reader .TXT) 📕

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, the
Universal 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 of
December 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 de
France 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 of
French 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 the
Project Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997. In the Newsletter of March 1998,
Michael Hart, its founder and executive director, mentioned that Project
Gutenberg's volunteers were now working on Etexts in French, German, Portuguese
and Spanish, and he was also expecting to have some coming in the following
languages: 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