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

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 of
electronic texts in Italian which was renamed after the famous publisher from
Venice who in the 16th century improved the printing techniques created by
Gutenberg.

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."

Projekt Runeberg is a digital library initiated in December 1992 by Lysator, a students' computer club, in cooperation with the Linköping University, Sweden. It is an open and voluntary initiative to create and collect free electronic editions of classic Nordic literature and art. Around 200 titles are available in full text, and there is also data on more than 6,000 Nordic authors.

Some digital libraries are organized around an author, for example The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare, The Dante Project or The Marx/Engels Internet
Archive (MEIA).

Begun in 1996, The Marx/Engels Internet Archive (MEIA) "is continually expanding, as one work after another is brought on-line […] Pictures/photos now adorn the site, with many more to come". The Marx & Engels WWW Library gives a chronology of the collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and access to a number of them. The Photo Gallery presents the Marx and Engels clan from 1839 to 1894, and their dwellings from 1818 to 1895.

The MEIA Search allows searching in the entire Marx/Engels Internet Library. "As larger works come on-line, they will also have small search pages made for them alone - for instance, Capital will have a search page for that work alone." The biographical archive gives access to biographies of Marx and Engels, and also short notices and photographs of the members of their family and their friends. The link "Others" gives access to a short biography and the works of Marxist writers, including: James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon, andHal Draper. The MEIA Non-English Archive lists the works of Marx and Engels in other languages (Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish), with links to them. The following statement is posted on the website:

"There's no way to monetarily profit from this project. 'Tis a labor of love undertaken in the purest communitarian sense. The real 'profit' will hopefully manifest in the form of individual enlightenment through easy access to these classic works. Besides, transcribing them is an education in itself… Let me also add that this is not a sectarian/One-Great-Truth effort. Help from any individual or any group is welcome. We have but one slogan: 'Piping Marx & Engels into cyberspace!'"

7.3. Digital Image Collections

Other digital libraries include pictures, for example the impressive Gallica. Available since 1997, Pictures and Texts of French 19th Century are the first part of the massive project of the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) which is digitizing thousands of texts and images relating to French history, life and culture.

The digital collections of American Memory are a major component of the Library of Congress's National Digital Library Program. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures.

"The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable texts."

There are currently over 30 collections in American Memory, for example:

(a) African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907: 351 rare pamphlets offering insight into attitudes and ideas of African Americans between Reconstruction and the First World War;

(b) Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955: Approximately 29,000 photographs of buildings, interiors, and gardens of renowned architects and interior designers.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections provide the public with digital versions of books, manuscripts, photographs, engravings, and other items as well as tools to browse, search, and analyze these materials remotely via the Internet. Four general sections allow the browsing of the collections: Digital Schomburg (Center for Research in Black Culture); Archival finding aids; Cooperative projects; and On-Line Exhibitions.

SPIRO (UC Berkeley Architecture/Slide Library Slide and Photograph Collection) is the visual on-line public access catalog (VOPAC) for the UC (University of California) Berkeley's Architecture Slide Library (ASL) collection of 200,000 35mm slides.

"SPIRO can be accessed using either Image Query, a powerful database retrieval package, or the World Wide Web. ImageQuery2.0 was developed originally by UC Berkeley's Information Systems and Technology, Advanced Technology Planning (ATP) Office under the direction of Barbara Morgan. ImageQuery2.0 is currently maintained by the Museum Informatics Project (MIP). ImageQuery SPIRO permits access to the collection by ten access points: period; place; creator name; object name; view type; subject terms from the Art and Architecture Thesaurus; source of image; creation dates; classification number; image identification number. The vast majority of images in SPIRO are copyrighted."

IMAGES 1 (on-line images of the National Library of Australia's Pictorial Collection) contains over 15,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its place in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs. The images have been selected from more than 40,000 paintings, drawings and prints and more than 550,000 photographs held in the National Library's Pictorial Collection. Topics covered include first impressions of Australia, convict days, gold mining and Australian towns.

IMAGES 1 offers a number of search options to enhance access to the images including searching by the creator (for example photographer or artist; other names associated with a work or collection; title; subject; the image number in the database; and by format (for example, watercolor or photograph).

Founded in 1989 by Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, Corbis is a main provider of visual content and services in the digital age, offering more than 20 million photographs and fine-art images (and 1,3 on-line) for access worldwide via the Internet, on CD-ROM disc, and through traditional stock catalogs. The images includes contemporary stock photography, photojournalism, archival photography, and royalty-free images, available to both creative professionals and private consumers.

7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries

The quick development of digital libraries leads us to define the role of the digital library, a very recent concept, relating to the much older "traditional" library, and vice versa.

In the same way that the paper document is not going to be "killed" by the electronic document, at least not in the near future, many librarians believe the "traditional" library is not going to be "killed" by the digital library.

When interviewed by Jérôme Strazzulla in Le Figaro of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre
Angremy, president of the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de
France) stated: "We cannot, we will not be able to digitize everything. In the
long term, a digital library will only be one element of the whole library".

Digital libraries give instant access to many works in the public domain. They also give instant access to old and rare texts and images. The full-screen images are still quite long to download, so many sites were backed up to present small images, so as not to ask too much from the cybernaut's patience. Most of the time a bigger format can be requested by clicking on the selected image. This problem should be solved in the future with improvements in data transmission.

The digital libraries also further the textual research on one or several works at the same time, such as the works of Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy, different versions of The Bible, etc.

The major problem of the cyberlibrary is the fact that recent documents cannot be posted because they don't belong to the public domain. Some projects, like DOI: The Digital Identifier System, an identification system for digital media, will enable automated copyright management systems.

Another problem is format harmonization, to allow the downloading of the texts by any hardware and software. Libraries often choose the ASCII format (ASCII: American standard code for information interchange) or the SGML format (SGML: standard generalized markup language).

Many organizations are involved in research relating to digital libraries.

Sponsored by the The Library of UC Berkeley and Sun Microsystems, SunSITE is the site where the Berkeley Digital Library builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to others doing the same. Its contents are: catalogs and indexes; help/search tools and administrative info; Java corner; teaching and training; text and image collections; information for digital library developers; research and development: where digital libraries are being built; tools: software for building digital libraries.

The Digital Library Technology (DLT) Project supports the development of new technologies to facilitate public access to the data of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) via computer networks, particularly technologies that develop tools, applications, and software and hardware systems that are able to scale upward to accommodate evolving user requirements and order-of-magnitude increases in user access.

The Stanford Universities Digital Libraries Project deals primarily with computing literature, with a