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 Science
at Carnegie Mellon University. The On-Line Books Page participates in the
Experimental Search System of the Library of Congress. It works with The
Universal 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, 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 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 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.