#In charge of the digital library of the digital library of the Bielefeld
University Library
* Interview of September 25, 1998
= When did you begin your digital library?
It depends what you understand this term to mean. To some here, "digital
library" seems to be everything even remotely to do with the Internet. The
library started its own web server in summer 1995. There's no exact date because
it took some time for us to get 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 customers, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material
from home. But in those days hardly anybody 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.
= How many digitized texts do you have?
In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting in November 1996
and ending in June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned as image files and made
available on the Web. In the same period, 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 the 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 rather bigger project to digitize German periodicals from the 18th and early
19th century is planned. This will involve about a million pages. These
periodicals will be not just be from this library's stock, but the project would
be coordinated here and some of the technical work done here too.