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Title: Technology and Books for All
Author: Marie Lebert
Release Date: October 29, 2008 [EBook #27098]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TECHNOLOGY AND BOOKS FOR ALL ***
Produced by Al Haines
TECHNOLOGY AND BOOKS FOR ALL
MARIE LEBERT
NEF, University of Toronto, 2008
Copyright © 1999-2008 Marie Lebert
With many thanks to those who kindly answered my questions over the years, and
who are quoted here. With many thanks to Mike Cook and Russon Wooldridge who
edited some parts published in previous papers. All the mistakes are mine - my
mother tongue is not English, but French. There is also a French version (not a
translation, but a different text): Les technologies et le livre pour tous.
TABLE
Introduction
Chronology
1968: ASCII
1971: Project Gutenberg
1974: Internet
1977: UNIMARC
1984: Copyleft
1990: Web
1991: Unicode
1993: Online Books Page
1993: PDF
1994: Library Websites
1994: Bold Publishers
1995: Amazon.com
1995: Online Press
1996: Internet Archive
1996: New Ways of Teaching
1996: Palm Pilot
1997: Digital Publishing
1997: Logos Dictionary
1997: Multimedia Convergence
1998: Online Beowulf
1998: Digital Librarians
1998: Multilingual Web
1999: Digital Authors
1999: yourDictionary.com
1999: Open eBook
2000: Online Bible of Gutenberg
2000: Distributed Proofreaders
2000: Public Library of Science
2001: Wikipedia
2002: MIT OpenCourseWare
2004: Creative Commons
2004: Project Gutenberg Europe
2004: Google Print / Book Search
2005: Open Content Alliance
2006: Microsoft Live Search Books
2006: Free WorldCat
2007: Citizendium
2007: Encyclopedia of Life
INTRODUCTION
Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web,
i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the
Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from
public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers - It is running
at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to
provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale
knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational
content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back
to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more
efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and
as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet. The
collections of existing digital libraries increase regularly, and new digital
libraries come up constantly.
While refrained from digitizing copyrighted books at this stage, many
institutions are interested in seeing copyright issues worked out, to provide
free access to as many works as possible. Another main issue is the proofreading
of digitized books that ensures a better accuracy of the text without any loss
from the print version. Good OCR software is said to ensure 99% accuracy,
leaving ten mistakes per page. If the step of the proofreading seems essential
to Project Gutenberg, this step is mostly skipped by the Internet Archive,
Google and many others.
Things went fast.
In the mid-1990s, some people were still asking questions like: Are the internet
and the print media antagonistic or complementary? How will the brand-new
internet take into account the centuries-old print book? Will they partner or
compete? Will the internet swallow up the world of the print media, or, to the
contrary, will the print media resist the internet? People were reluctant,
curious and passionate.
Then more and more publications were produced in both electronic and paper form,
and could be ordered online. There were more and more electronic works in
digital libraries. Some books, newspapers and magazines began to be available
online only. More and more websites were set up for readers to find the full
text or abstracts of books, archives, in-depth files on various topics, etc.
More and more library catalogs were available online.
In short, the internet became essential for getting information, having access
to documents and broadening our knowledge.
Many of us are now working at full speed to build up a universal digital
library.
CHRONOLOGY
Here are the mains steps that will be highlighted below.
1968: ASCII is the first encoding.
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library.
1974: The Internet takes off.
1977: UNIMARC is set up as a common bibliographic format.
1984: Copyleft is set up as an alternative to copyright for the internet.
1990: The web takes off.
1991: Unicode is created as a universal encoding.
1993: The Online Books Page is the first main list of free online books.
1993: The PDF format is set up by Adobe.
1994: The first library website goes online.
1994: Publishers put some of their books online for free.
1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore.
1995: The mainstream press goes online.
1996: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web.
1996: Teachers explore new ways of teaching.
1996: The Palm Pilot is the first PDA.
1997: Online publishing begins spreading.
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free.
1997: Multimedia convergence is the topic of a main symposium.
1998: Library treasures like Beowulf go online.
1999: Librarians become webmasters.
1998: The web becomes multilingual.
1999: Authors go digital.
1999: yourDictionary.com is created as a main language portal.
1999: The Open eBook (OeB) format is set up as a standard format.
2000: The Bible of Gutenberg goes online.
2000: Distributed Proofreaders begins to help Project Gutenberg.
2000: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) works on free online high-quality
periodicals.
2001: Wikipedia is the first main online cooperative encyclopedia.
2003: The MIT offers its courses for free online in its OpenCourseWare.
2004: Creative Commons works on new ways to respect authors' rights on the web.
2004: Project Gutenberg Europe is launched as a multilingual project.
2004: Google launches Google Print to rename it Google Book Search later on.
2005: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) takes off as a universal public online
library.
2006: Microsoft launches Live Search Books as its own universal library.
2006: The union catalog WorldCat goes online for free.
2007: Citizendium is created as a main online academic encyclopedia.
2007: The Encyclopedia of Life is created as a main database on species of
animal and plants.
1968: ASCII
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Used since the beginnings of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for information
interchange in English. It was published in 1968 by ANSI (American National
Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and 1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII,
also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set of 128 characters with 95 printable
unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), i.e.
the ones that are available on the English/American keyboard. Plain Vanilla
ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by any simple text editor or word
processor. It is the only format compatible with 99% of all hardware and
software. It can be used as it is or to create versions in many other formats.
Extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) are sets of 256
characters that include accented characters as found in French, Spanish and
German, for example ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) for French.
[ASCII in Project Gutenberg (published in 2005)]
Whether digitized years ago or now, all Project Gutenberg books are created in
7-bit plain ASCII, called Plain Vanilla ASCII. When 8-bit ASCII (also called
ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) is used for books with accented characters like French or
German, Project Gutenberg also produces a 7-bit ASCII version with the accents
stripped. (This doesn't apply for languages that are not "convertible" in ASCII,
like Chinese, encoded in Big-5.)
Project Gutenberg sees Plain Vanilla ASCII as the best format by far. It is "the
lowest common denominator". It can be read, written, copied and printed by any
simple text editor or word processor on any electronic device. It is the only
format compatible with 99% of hardware and software. It can be used as it is or
to create versions in many other formats. It will still be used while other
formats will be obsolete (or are already obsolete, like formats of a few
short-lived reading devices launched since 1999). It is the assurance
collections will never be obsolete, and will survive future technological
changes. The goal is to preserve the texts not only over decades but over
centuries. There is no other standard as widely used as ASCII right now, even
Unicode, a universal double-byte character encoding launched in 1991 to support
any language and any platform.
1971: PROJECT GUTENBERG
[Overview (published in 2008)]
In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of making
available for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to public
domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first
information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library. When the
internet became popular in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and an
international dimension. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in
August 1997) to 5,000 (in April 2002), 10,000 (in October 2003), 15,000 (in
January 2005), 20,000 (in December 2006) and 25,000 (in April 2008), with a
current production rate of around 340 new books each month. With 55 languages
and 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens of
thousands every day. Project Gutenberg promotes digitization in “text format”,
meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with
other books. Contrary to other formats, the files are accessible for
low-bandwidth use. The main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks is
Distributed Proofreaders, conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks to help in
the digitizing of books from public domain.
[Longer Version (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
The electronic book (eBook) is now 37 years old, which is still a short life
comparing to the five and a half century print book. eBooks were born with
Project Gutenberg, created by Michael Hart in July 1971 to make available for
free electronic versions of literary books belonging to public domain. A pioneer
site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first information provider
on an embryonic internet and is the oldest digital library. Long considered by
its critics as impossible on a large scale, Project Gutenberg counted 25,000
books in April 2008, with tens of thousands downloads daily. To this day, nobody
has done a better job of putting the world's literature at everyone's disposal.
And to create a vast network of volunteers all over the world, without wasting
people's skills or energy.
During the first twenty years, Michael Hart himself keyed in the first hundred
books, with the occasional help of others. When the internet became popular, in
the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and an international dimension. Michael
still typed and scanned in books, but now coordinated the work of dozens and
then hundreds of volunteers across many countries. The number of electronic
books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in
December 2000) and 4,000 (in October 2001).
37 years after its birth, Project Gutenberg is running at full capacity. It had
5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books in October 2003, 15,000 books in
January 2005, 20,000 books in December 2006 and 25,000 books in April 2008, with
340 new books available per month, 40 mirror sites in a number of countries,
books downloaded by the tens of thousands every day, and tens of thousands of
volunteers in various teams.
Whether they were digitized 30 years ago or digitized now, all the books are
captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII), with the same
formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or
software, including on a PDA, a cell phone or an eBook reader. Any individual or
organization is free to convert them to different formats, without any
restriction except respect for copyright laws in the country involved.
In January 2004, Project Gutenberg had spread across the Atlantic with the
creation of Project Gutenberg Europe. On top of its original mission, it also
became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a number of national and
linguistic sections. While adhering to the same principle: books for all and for
free, through electronic versions that can be used and reproduced indefinitely.
And, as a second step, the digitization of images and sound, in the same spirit.
1974: INTERNET
[Overview (published in 2008)]
When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the internet was not even born. On
July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States
Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was
using. In upper case, because there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5K file
to the 100 users of the embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So
Michael mentioned where the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link,
because the web was still 20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. The
internet was born in 1974 with the creation of TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol / Internet Protocol) by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in
1983. It got a boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and of the first
browser in 1993. At the end of 1997, there were 90 to 100 million users, with
one million new users every month. At the end of 2000, there were over 300
million users. At the end of 2006, we reached the landmark of one billion users.
1977: UNIMARC
[A Story (published in 1999)]
At the time, the future of online catalogs was linked to the harmonization of
the MARC format. Set up in the early 1970s, MARC is an acronym for Machine
Readable Catalogue. This acronym is rather misleading as MARC is neither a kind
of catalog nor a method of cataloguing. According to UNIMARC: An Introduction, a
document of the Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Core
Programme, MARC is "a short and convenient term for assigning labels to each
part of a catalogue record so that it can be handled by computers. While the
MARC format was primarily designed to serve the needs of libraries, the concept
has since been embraced by the wider information community as a convenient way
of storing and exchanging bibliographic data."
After MARC came MARC II. MARC II established rules to be followed consistently
over the years. The MARC communication format intended to be "hospitable to all
kinds of library materials; sufficiently flexible for a variety of applications
in addition to catalogue production; and usable in a range of automated
systems."
Over the years, however, despite cooperation efforts, several versions of MARC
emerged, e.g. UKMARC, INTERMARC and USMARC, whose paths diverged because of
different national cataloguing practices and requirements. We had an extended
family of more than 20 MARC formats. Differences in data content meant some
extensive editing was needed before records could be exchanged.
One solution to incompatible data was to create an international MARC format -
called UNIMARC - which would accept records created in any MARC format. Records
in one MARC format would first be converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted
into another MARC format, so that each national bibliographic agency would need
to write only two programs - one to convert into UNIMARC and one to convert from
UNIMARC - instead of having to write twenty programs for the conversion of each
MARC format (e.g. INTERMARC to UKMARC, USMARC to UKMARC etc.).
In 1977, the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions) published UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format, followed by a second
edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983. These publications focused
primarily on the cataloguing of monographs and serials, while taking into
account international efforts towards the standardization of bibliographic
information reflected in the ISBDs (International Standard Bibliographic
Descriptions).
In the mid-1980s, UNIMARC expanded to cover documents other than monographs and
serials. A new UNIMARC Manual was produced in 1987, with an updated description
of UNIMARC. By this time UNIMARC had been adopted by several bibliographic
agencies as their in-house format.
Developments didn't stop there. A standard for authorities files was set up in
1991, as explained on the website of IFLA in 1998: "Previously agencies had
entered an author's name into the bibliographic format as many times as there
were documents associated with him or her. With the new system they created a
single authoritative form of the name (with references) in the authorities file;
the record control number for this name was the only item included in the
bibliographic file. The user would still see the name in the bibliographic
record, however, as the computer could import it from the authorities file at a
convenient time. So in 1991 UNIMARC/Authorities was published."
In 1991 a Permanent UNIMARC Committee was also created to regularly monitor the
development of UNIMARC. Users realized that continuous maintenance - and not
just the occasional rewriting of manuals - was needed, to make sure all changes
were compatible with what already existed.
On top of adopting UNIMARC as a common format, The British Library (using
UKMARC), the Library of Congress (using USMARC) and the National Library of
Canada (using CAN/MARC) worked on harmonizing their national MARC formats. A
three-year program to achieve a common MARC format was agreed on by the three
libraries in December 1995.
Other libraries began using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) as a
common format for both the bibliographic records and the hypertextual and
multimedia documents linked to them. As most publishers were using SGML for book
records, librarians and publishers began working on a convergence between MARC
and SGML. The Library of Congress worked on a DTD (Definition of Type of
Document, which defines its logical structure) for the USMARC format. A DTD for
the UNIMARC format was developed by the European Union. Some European libraries
chose SGML to encode their bibliographic data. In the Belgian Union Catalog, for
example, the use of SGML allowed to add descriptive elements and to facilitate
the production of an annual CD-ROM.
1984: COPYLEFT
[Overview (published in 2008)]
The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallmann, who was a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). "Copyleft is
a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all
modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. (...) Copyleft
says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must
pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that
every user has freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the
program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make
copyleft impossible. The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a reference to the
verb 'to leave' — only to the direction which is the inverse of 'right'. (...)
The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a form of copyleft intended for use
on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom
to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially
or non commercially." (excerpt from the GNU website)
1990: WEB
[A Story (published in 1999, updated in 2008)]
The World Wide Web -that became the Web or web- was invented by Tim Berners-Lee
in 1989-90. In 1998, he added: “The dream behind the web is of a common
information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its
universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything,
be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a
second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that
it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in
which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it,
make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can
better work together.” (excerpt from: The World Wide Web: A very short personal
history, May 1998.)
Christiane Jadelot, researcher at INaLF-Nancy (INaLF: National Institute of the
French Language) wrote: "I began to really use the internet in 1994, with a
browser called Mosaic. I found it a very useful way of improving my knowledge of
computers, linguistics, literature... everything. I was finding the best and the
worst, but as a discerning user, I had to sort it all out and make choices. I
particularly liked the software for e-mail, file transfers and dial-up
connections. At that time I had problems with a programme called Paradox and
character sets that I couldn't use. I tried my luck and threw out a question in
a specialist news group. I got answers from all over the world. Everyone seemed
to want to solve my problem!" (excerpt from an interview dated July 1998,
translated by ML)
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was founded in October 1994 to develop
interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software and tools) for
the web, as a forum for information, commerce, communication and collective
understanding. The W3C develops common protocols to lead the evolution of the
web, for example the specifications of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and XML
(eXtensible Markup Language). HTML is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext
on the web. XML was originally designed as a tool for large-scale electronic
publishing. It now plays an increasingly important role in the exchange of a
wide variety of data on the web and elsewhere.
According to the network tracking firm Netcraft, there were 100 million websites
on November 1st, 2006. Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April
1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million),
July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March
2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million), April 2006 (80 million ) and August
2006 (90 million).
1991: UNICODE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
First published in January 1991, Unicode is the universal character encoding
maintained by the Unicode Consortium. "Unicode provides a unique number for
every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no
matter what the language." (excerpt from the website) This double-byte
platform-independent encoding provides a basis for the processing, storage and
interchange of text data in any language, and any modern software and
information technology protocols. Unicode is a component of the W3C (World Wide
Web Consortium) specifications.
1993: ONLINE BOOKS PAGE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at Carnegie
Mellon University, The Online Books Page is "a website that facilitates access
to books that are freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage
the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all."
(excerpt from the website) John Ockerbloom first maintained this page on the
website of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In
1999, he moved it to its present location at the University of Pennsylvania
Library, where he is a digital library planner and researcher. The Online Books
Page listed 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000 books
published by women), 25,000 books in 2006 and 30,000 books in 2007. The books
"have been authored, placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of individuals
and groups throughout the world", with 7,000 books from Project Gutenberg. The
FAQ also lists copyright information about most countries in the world with
links to further reading.
[Longer Version (published in 1999)]
John Mark Ockerbloom first started the website of the School of Computer Science
of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU CS), and began maintaining The Online Books
Page on it. Web space and computing resources were provided by the School of
Computer Science.
Interviewed by email in September 1998, John wrote: "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 Online Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some
books put online 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 online, 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 Online 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 online 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 online books works in some
form or another.
I 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."
In 1998, The Online Books Page listed more than 7,000 books, which could be
browsed by author, by title or by subject. It also listed significant
directories and archives of online texts, and special exhibits. From the main
search page, users could search four types of media: books, music, art, and
video.
The Online Books Page began listing serials. As stated on the website: "Along
with books, The Online 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'.)"
The Online Books Page participated in the Experimental Search System of the
Library of Congress. It also worked with The Universal Library Project, hosted
at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1999, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Ph.D. in computer science,
John moved to work as a digital library planner and researcher at the University
of Pennsylvania Library. He also moved The Online Books Page there, and went on
expanding it.
1993: PDF
[Overview (published in 2008)]
PDF (Portable Document Format) was conceived by Adobe in 1992, launched in June
1993 with Adobe Acrobat software, and perfected over 15 years as the global
standard for distribution and viewing of information. It "lets you capture and
view robust information from any application, on any computer system and share
it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government
agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and
vision." (excerpt from the website) Adobe Acrobat gives the tools to create and
view PDF files and is available in many languages and for many platforms
(Macintosh, Windows, Unix, etc.). Today (in 2008), over 500 million copies of
PDF-based Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader, until May 2003) have been
downloaded worldwide. Approximately 10% of the documents on the internet are
available in PDF.
1994: LIBRARY WEBSITES
[A Story (published in 1999)]
The first library website was the one of the Helsinki City Library in Finland,
which went live in February 1994. Many libraries began developing a digital
library alongside their standard collections. Digital libraries allowed a large
audience to have access to documents belonging to specialized, old, local or
regional collections. Thanks to their digital libraries, traditional libraries
could achieve a long-time dream and fulfill two goals which used to be in
contradiction - book preservation and book communication. On the one hand, books
were taken out of their shelves only once to be scanned. On the other hand,
books could easily be accessed anywhere at any time, and read on the screen of a
computer, without the need to go to the library and struggle through a lengthy
process to have access to the original books, for various reasons: 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 often hurdles to get over, and often required of the researcher an
unfailing patience and an out-of-the-ordinary determination to finally get to
the document.
Some virtual libraries were created from scratch, right on the internet from the
beginning, with no back up from a traditional library. This was the case of
Athena, founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss teacher, and hosted on the
website of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Athena was created as a
multilingual digital library focusing on philosophy, science, classics,
literature, history, and economics. As Geneva is in French-speaking Switzerland,
it also focused on putting French texts online. The Helvetia section gathered
documents about Switzerland. A specific page offered a number of links to other
digital libraries in the world.
In an interview dated February 1996, Pierre Perroud explained: "Electronic texts
represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culture
dissemination, (...) [and] a good complement to the paper book, which remains
irreplaceable for reading (...). [The paper book] remains a mysteriously holy
companion with profound symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it
against our bodies, we look at it with admiration; its small size comforts us
and its content impresses us; its fragility contains a density we are fascinated
by; like man it fears water and fire, but it has the power to shelter man's
thoughts from time." (excerpt from the Swiss magazine Informatique-Informations,
translated by ML)
The Internet Public Library (IPL) opened in March 1995 as the first digital
public library of and for the internet community. Its different sections were:
Reference; Exhibits; Magazines and Serials; Newspapers; Online Texts; and Web
Searching. There were also sections for Teen and Youth. All the items of the
collections were carefully selected, catalogued and described by the IPL staff.
As an experimental library, IPL also listed the most interesting projects run by
librarians on the internet, in the section Especially for Librarians.
1994: BOLD PUBLISHERS
[A Story (published in 1999)]
The web became a marketing tool for publishers. Some publishers decided to put
the full text of some books on the web, for free, with their authors' consent.
Oddly enough, there was no drop in sales - on the contrary, sales increased. In
the US, NAP was the first publisher to take such a risk in 1994, followed by the
MIT Press in 1995, and it worked.
NAP (National Academy Press) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to
publish its own reports and the ones of the National Academy of Engineering, the
Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. In 1994, NAP was
publishing 200 books a year in science, engineering, and health. The NAP Reading
Room was offering 1,000 entire books, free for reading, from the first page to
the last, and available in a variety of versions, including scanned pages in
image format, hypertext HTML books, and Adobe Acrobat PDF files.
In 1995, the MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was
publishing 200 new books a year and 40 journals, first in science and
technology, and then in architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive
science, and computational science. The MIT Press decided to put a number of
books online for free, as "a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative
use of new technologies". Sales of the print books increased.
Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, wrote in 1997: "As university
publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering scholarly
documents online, some early innovators are finding that making a monograph
available electronically can boost sales of hard copies. The National Academy
Press has already put 1,700 of its books online, and is finding that the
electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy monographs
- often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great advertising', says
the Press's director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar results: 'For each
of our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our sales. The plain fact
is that no one is going to sit there and read a whole book online. And it costs
money and time to download it'." (excerpt from the Project Gutenberg Newsletter
of October 1997)
1995: AMAZON.COM
[A Story (published in 1999)]
Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in July 1995, after a market study which led him
to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the internet.
In Spring 1994, he drew up a list of twenty products that could be sold online,
ranging from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched the top five,
which were CDs, videos, computer hardware, computer software, and books.
"I used a whole bunch of criteria to evaluate the potential of each product, but
among the main criteria was the size of the relative markets. Books, I found
out, were an $82 billion market worldwide. The price point was another major
criterion: I wanted a low-priced product. I reasoned that since this was the
first purchase many people would make online, it had to be non-threatening in
size. A third criterion was the range of choice: there were 3 million items in
the book category and only a tenth of that in CDs, for example. This was
important because the wider the choice, the more the organizing and selection
capabilities of the computer could be put in good use." (excerpt from the
Amazon.com press kit)
In 1998, Amazon.com was offering 3 million books, CDs, audio books, DVDs,
computer games - more than 14 times as many titles as the large chain
superstores - to 3 million people in 160 countries. "Businesses can do things on
the web that simply cannot be done any other way", wrote Jeff Bezos. "We are
changing the way people buy books and music." Amazon.com quickly became the
largest online bookstore, with a catalog of these 3 million items that could be
ordered online, authoritative reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer
reviews, and book recommendations. As an internet retailer, Amazon.com could
offer more services than traditional retailers: lower prices, larger selection,
and a wealth of product information.
Any book lover could post his own reviews of books on Amazon's website, and read
others. He could read many interviews with authors, and a number of blurbs and
excerpts from books. He could search for books by author, subject, title, ISBN
or publication date. Prices were discounted, with savings of 20-40% on 400,000
titles (40% on selected feature books, 30% on hardcovers, and 20% on
paperbacks). The client usually received the books within a week. If he
requested it, he could receive an email announcing a new book by a favorite
author or a new book on a favorite topic. He could select some book categories
(44 listed), to be sent a monthly review of new books by email. All things that
were entirely new at the time.
What we take for granted now, i.e. buy a book in Europe from the US site of
Amazon.com, or buy a book in the US from the German site of Amazon.de, was
making big waves at the time, first as "unfair competition" with the local
online bookstores, then for taxation. A first outline agreement was concluded
between the US and the European Union in December 1997, and this agreement was
followed by an international convention. The internet was decided a free trade
area, i.e. without any custom taxes for software, films and electronic books
bought online. Material goods (books, CDs, DVDs, and so on) and services were
subject to existing regulations, with collection of the VAT for example, but
with no additional custom taxes.
Amazon.com and others had great assets, but there were bad news for small
bookstores. Like the small bookstore set up in 1971 by my friend Catherine
Domain in central Paris, on Ile Saint-Louis, in the middle of the river Seine.
The small Ulysses Bookstore is known as the oldest travel bookstore in the
world. It has more than 20,000 books, maps and magazines, out of print and new,
in a number of languages, about any country and any kind of travel, all packed
up in a tiny space. Catherine has been a traveller since she was a child. She
travels every summer - usually sailing - while her boyfriend runs the bookstore.
She is also a member of the French National Union of Antiquarian and Modern
Bookstores (SLAM), the Explorers' Club and the International Club of
Long-Distance Travellers.
Catherine visited 140 countries, where she sometimes had a hard time. But one of
her most difficult challenges was to set up a website on her own, from scratch,
without knowing anything about computers. Catherine wrote me in December 1999:
"My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is
a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain
in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but
that doesn't worry me..." (translated by ML) Nevertheless, despite the internet,
she was pessimistic about the future. "I am very pessimistic, because the
internet is killing off specialist bookstores."
1995: ONLINE PRESS
[A Story (published in 1999)]
The first electronic versions of newspapers were available in the early 1990s
through commercial services like America Online or CompuServe. Then, in 1995,
newspapers and magazines began to create websites to offer the full version of
their latest issue - available freely or through subscription (free or paid) -
which was then archived online. Other newspapers and magazines were created as
"only" electronic. There were also heated debates on copyright issues for
articles posted on the web.
In 1996, the site of The New York Times could be accessed free of charge. It
included the contents of the daily newspaper, breaking news updates every ten
minutes, and original reporting available only online. The site of The
Washington Post gave the daily news online, with a full database of articles
including images, sound and video. The site of The Los Angeles Times announced
for soon a machine translation service of its news into Spanish and French, and
later in Japanese, with software provided by Alis Technologies.
In Europe, the Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website called Times
Online, with a way to create a personalized edition. The respected Economist was
also available online, as were the French daily newspapers Le Monde and
Libération, the Spanish daily newspaper El País or the German weekly magazines
Focus or Der Spiegel.
The computer press went online as well. First the monthly Wired, created in 1992
in California to focus on cyberculture and be the magazine of the future at the
avant-garde of the 21st century. Then ZDNet, a main publisher of computer
magazines.
Behind the news, the web was providing a whole encyclopedia to help us
understand them. The web was providing instant access to a wealth of information
(geographical maps, biographical notes, official texts, political and economic
data, audiovisual and video data); speed in information dissemination; access to
main photographic archives; links to articles, archives and data on the same
topic; and a search engine to browse articles by date, author, title, subject,
etc.
From the start, there were also all these zines using the internet as a cheap
way to get published. John Labovitz launched The E-Zine-List in Summer 1993 to
list electronic zines (e-zines) around the world, the ones that were accessible
via the web, FTP, gopher, email, and other services. The list was updated
monthly.
What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on his website: "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."
3,045 zines were listed on November 29, 1998. John wrote on his website: "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'." John stopped updating his list a few years later.
1996: INTERNET ARCHIVE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit
organization that built an "internet library" to offer permanent access to
historical collections in digital format for researchers, historians and
scholars. An archive of the web is stored every two months or so. In October
2001, with 30 billion web pages stored, the Internet Archive launched the
Wayback Machine, for users to be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In
2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month.
In 2006, there were 65 billion pages from 50 million websites. In late 1999, the
Internet Archive also started to include more collections of archived web pages
on specific topics. It also became an online digital library of text, audio,
software, image and video content. In October 2005, the Internet Archive
launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with other contributors as a collective
effort to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text (Text
Archive) and multimedia content.
1996: NEW WAYS OF TEACHING
[A Quote (published in 1999)]
Going from print book culture to digital culture began changing our relationship
to knowledge. Book culture provided stable information whereas digital culture
provided "moving" information. During the September 1996 meeting of the IFIP
(International Federation of Information Processing), Dale Spender gave an
interesting lecture about Creativity and the Computer Education Industry.
Here are some excerpts.
"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this
has helped to shape our notion of information. For the information in books
stays the same - it endures.
And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of
knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorised, and tested of
course.
The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is
something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this
stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes
of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. (...)
But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest
information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and
useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in -
and which we will pay the most for. (...)
Education will be about participating in the production of the latest
information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and
work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To
keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be members of the digital
community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life,
the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out,
add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make
available the constant changes that are occurring."
1996: PALM PILOT
[Few Words (published in 2002)]
The Palm Pilot was the first PDA.
23 million Palm Pilot were sold between 1996 and 2002.
1997: DIGITAL PUBLISHING
[A Story (published in 1999)]
Since the 1970s, the traditional publishing chain has drastically changed. The
printing work done by pre-press shops was first disrupted by new
photocomposition machines. Text and image processing began to be handed over to
advertising and graphic art agencies. Impression costs went on decreasing with
desktop publishing, copiers, color copiers and digital printing equipment.
In 1997, text and image processing was provided at a low price by desktop
publishing shops and graphic art studios. Digitization accelerated the
publication process. Editors, designers and other contributors could all work at
the same time on the same book.
Digitization also made possible the online publishing of educational and
scientific publications, which appeared as a far better solution than print
books, because they could be regularly updated with the latest information. Some
universities began distributing their own textbooks online, with chapters
selected in an extensive database, and articles and commentaries from
professors. For a seminar, a small print could be made upon request with a
selection of online articles sent to a printer.
Electronic publishing allowed some academic publishers to keep running their
business, with lower costs and quick access. This way, small publishers went on
publishing specialized books, for which the printing in a small number of copies
had become more and more difficult over the years due to budgetary reasons.
These books could now be regularly updated and their readers benefit from the
latest version. Readers didn't need to wait any more for a new printed edition,
often postponed if not cancelled because of commercial constraints.
Electronic publishing and traditional publishing became complementary. The
frontier between the two supports - electronic and paper - was vanishing. Most
recent print media already stemmed from an electronic version anyway, on a word
processor, a spreadsheet or a database. More and more documents became only
electronic. And more and more print books were scanned to be included in digital
bookstores and libraries.
At the end of the 1990s, there were no reliable statistics yet proving that the
large-scale use of computers and electronic documents would make us paperless
and save some tress, as hoped by all of us who believe in nature preservation.
We were still in a transition period. Many people still needed a print version
for a better reading, or to keep track of a document in case the electronic file
was accidentally deleted, or to have some paper support for their documentation
or archives.
1997: LOGOS DICTIONARY
[A Story (published in 1999)]
The Logos Dictionary is a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 words (as of
December 10, 1998). The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word multilingual library
with a massive database of 325,916,827 words extracted from multilingual novels,
technical literature and translated texts. Logos Linguistic Resources is a
database of 553 glossaries. The Logos Universal Conjugator is a database for the
conjugation of verbs in 17 languages.
Logos is an international translation company based in Modena, Italy. In 1997,
Logos decided to put all the linguistic tools used by its translators on the web
for free. Logos had 200 translators on the spot and 2,500 free-lance translators
all over the world, who processed around 200 texts per day.
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." (translated by ML)
In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote: "The Logos site is much more than a mere
dictionary or a collection of links to other online 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 online bookstore. Foreign
translations are also available. However, if no text containing the required
word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending the user to other
websites mentioning 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
suggestions, after which Logos translators and the company check the forwarded
translations." (translated by ML)
1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE
[A Story (published in 1999)]
The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at
the headquarters of ILO (International Labour Office) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Peter Leisink, associate professor of labour studies at the Utrecht University,
Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry
showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as
home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment,
not as a first-choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations
and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized
workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend
to depend on only one publishing house for their work."
This international symposium was held as a tripartite meeting with employers,
unionists and government representatives. Some participants still thought our
information society would generate jobs, whereas it was already stated worldwide
that multimedia convergence was leading to a massive loss of jobs.
Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book, Paper and
Communication Industry, stated that the French graphics industry had lost 20,000
jobs - falling from 110,000 to 90,000 - within the last decade, and that
expensive social plans had been necessary to re-employ those people. He
explained: "If the technological developments really created new jobs, as had
been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable
studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost,
rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies
should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the
technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing
industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused
by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups
controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other
media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax
advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the
new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the
social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread
agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither
individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these
matters."
Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' interventions, here was the answer
of Walter Durling, director of AT&T Global Information Solutions: "Technology
would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of
communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would
all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would
continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it
could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When television was
developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but it had not. One
should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should not lead us to
stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to generate new
employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the new
technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced. Problems
should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose." In short, humanity
shouldn't fear technology.
In fact, employees were not so much afraid of the future as they were afraid of
losing their jobs. In 1997, our society already had a high unemployment rate,
which was not the case when film was invented and television developed. During
the next years, what would be the balance between job creation and lay-off?
Unions were struggling worldwide to promote the creation of jobs through
investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining for
new jobs, fair conditions for contracts and collective agreements, defense of
copyright, protection of workers in the artistic field, and defense of
teleworkers as workers having full rights. The European Commission was expecting
10 million European teleworkers in the year 2000, which would represent 20% of
teleworkers worldwide.
Despite unions' efforts, would the situation become as tragic as what we read in
the report of the symposium? "Some fear a future in which individuals will be
forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle. And the survival
mechanisms which have been developed in recent decades, such as relatively
stable employment relations, collective agreements, employee representation,
employer-provided job training, and jointly funded social security schemes, may
be sorely tested in a world where work crosses borders at the speed of light."
1998: ONLINE BEOWULF
[A Story (published in 1999)]
Libraries began using the web to make their treasures freely available to the
world.
Here is the story of Beowulf.
Beowulf is a treasure of the British Library. "It is an Old English heroic epic
poem of anonymous authorship. This work of Anglo-Saxon literature dates to
between the 8th and the 11th century, the only surviving European manuscript
dating to the early 11th century. At 3,183 lines, it is notable for its length."
(excerpt from Wikipedia)
The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731. 18th-century transcripts
mention hundreds of words and letters which were then visible along the charred
edges, and subsequently crumbled away over the years. To halt this process, each
leaf was mounted on a paper frame in 1845.
Scholarly discussions on the date of creation and provenance 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 raised
conservation issues. It also made it unavailable for the many visitors who were
coming to the Library expecting to see this literary treasure on display.
Digitization of the manuscript offered a solution to these problems, as well as
providing new opportunities for readers, and for the world to enjoy.
The Electronic Beowulf Project was launched as a huge database of digital images
of the Beowulf manuscript and related manuscripts and printed texts. In 1998,
the database included fiber-optic readings of hidden letters and ultraviolet
readings of erased text in the manuscript; full electronic facsimiles of the
18th-century transcripts of the manuscript; and selections from important
19th-century collations, editions and translations. Major additions were
planned, such as images of contemporary manuscripts, and links with the Toronto
Dictionary of Old English Project and with the comprehensive Anglo-Saxon
bibliographies of the Old English Newsletter.
The project was developed in partnership with two leading experts, Kevin
Kiernan, from the University of Kentucky and Paul Szarmach, from the Medieval
Institute, Western Michigan University. Professor Kiernan edited the electronic
archive and produced a CD-Rom containing a number of electronic images.
Brian Lang, chief executive of the British Library, explained in 1998: "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." (excerpt from the 1998
website)
The British Library was a pioneer in Europe. Other treasures of the library were
already online: Magna Carta, the first English constitutional text, signed in
1215, with the Great Seal of King John; the Lindisfarne Gospels, dated 698; the
Diamond Sutra, dated 868, which could be the world's earliest print book; the
Sforza Hours, dated 1490-1520, an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the Codex
Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), and the Tyndale New
Testament, the first English version of the New Testament, printed by Peter
Schoeffer, in Worms.
Brian King also stated the importance of the paper world, and the ongoing
commitment of the British Library to its paper collections. He added: "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 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." (excerpt from the website)
Other national libraries started digitizing their collections to offer a free
digital library.
When interviewed by Jérôme Strazzulla in the daily newspaper Le Figaro of June
3, 1998, Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the French National Library, 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." (translated by
ML) The digital library Gallica went online in 1997 with thousands of texts and
images relating to French history, life and culture. A major collection of
19th-century French texts and images was available one year later.
1998: DIGITAL LIBRARIANS
[Two Experiences (published in 1999)]
I interviewed Peter Raggett, a digital librarian at OECD (Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development), and Bruno Didier, a digital librarian at
Institute Pasteur. Here are some excerpts.
= Peter Raggett
What is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that
OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is
not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's
commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The core of original
members has expanded from Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia,
New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And
there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through programmes with
countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin America - contacts which, in
some cases, may lead to membership." (excerpt from the 1998 website)
The Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) of OECD provides information
to OECD agents in support of their research work. In 1998, there were 60,000
monographs and 2,500 periodicals. The CDI also provides information in
electronic format from databases, CD-ROMs and the internet.
Peter Raggett, head of the CDI, has been a professional librarian for nearly
twenty years, first working in UK government libraries and then at the OECD
since 1994. He has used the internet since 1996. He built up the CDI Intranet
pages, which became a main tool for the staff.
Peter wrote in June 1998: "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."
Peter added: "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. 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."
What about the future? "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. (...) Information managers have a large
role to play in searching and arranging the information on the internet. 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."
= Bruno Didier
In 1999, Bruno Didier was the webmaster of the Institute Pasteur Library. "The
Pasteur Institutes are exceptional observatories for studying infectious and
parasite-borne diseases. They are wedded to the solving of practical public
health problems, and hence carry out research programmes which are highly
original because of the complementary nature of the investigations carried out:
clinical research, epidemiological surveys and basic research work. Just a few
examples from the long list of major topics of the Institutes are: malaria,
tuberculosis, AIDS, yellow fever, dengue and poliomyelitis." (excerpt from the
1999 website)
In August 1999, Bruno wrote about his work as a webmaster: "The main aim of the
Pasteur Institute Library website is to serve the Institute itself and its
associated bodies. It supports applications that have become essential in such a
big organization: bibliographic databases, cataloguing, ordering of documents
and of course access to online periodicals (presently more than 100). It is also
a window for our different departments, at the Institute but also elsewhere in
France and abroad. It plays a big part in documentation exchanges with the
institutes in the worldwide Pasteur network. I am trying to make it an interlink
adapted to our needs for exploration and use of the internet. The website has
existed in its present form since 1996 and its audience is steadily increasing.
I build and maintain the web pages and monitor them regularly. I am also
responsible for training users, which you can see from my pages. The web is an
excellent place for training and is included in most ongoing discussions about
training." (translated by ML)
What about the future of librarians? "Our relationship with both the information
and the users is what changes. We are increasingly becoming mediators, and
perhaps to a lesser extent 'curators'. My present activity is typical of this
new situation: I am working to provide quick access to information and to create
effective means of communication, but I also train people to use these new
tools. I think the future of our job is tied to cooperation and use of common
resources. It is certainly an old project, but it is really the first time we
have had the means to set it up." (translated by ML)
1998: MULTILINGUAL WEB
[A Story (published in 2000, updated in 2004)]
In 1998, other languages than English began spreading on the web. MIn fact, main
non-English languages were there nearly from the start. But most of the web was
in English. Then people from all over the world began having access to the
internet, and posting pages in their own languages. The percentage of the
English language began to slowly decrease from nearly 100% to 90%.
In 1998, Randy Hobler was an internet marketing consultant for Globalink, a
company specialized in language translation software and services. Previously,
Randy worked as a consultant for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Burroughs Wellcome,
Pepsi, Heublein, and others.
Randy wrote in September 1998: "Because the internet has no national boundaries,
the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium
itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example,
of what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the internet wherever
they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the
Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but
millions of Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like
Spanish-speaking Morocco."
In 1999, Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of Chroniques de Cybérie, a weekly
report of internet news. Jean-Pierre wrote in August 1999: "The web is going to
grow in these non English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the
technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these 'new' users. I think
it is a pity there are so few translations of important documents and essays
published on the web -- from English into other languages and vice-versa. (...)
The recent introduction of the internet in regions where it is spreading raises
questions which would be good to read about. When will Spanish-speaking
communications theorists and those speaking other languages be translated?"
(translated by ML)
In 1999, Marcel Grangier was the head of the French Section of the Swiss Federal
Government's Central Linguistic Services, which meant he was in charge of
organizing translation matters for the Swiss government. Marcel wrote in January
1999: "We can see multilingualism on the internet as a happy and irreversible
inevitability. So we have to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the
supremacy of English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is
mainly based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking
English, etc.). The answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine about it,
but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation service, we also
recommend that websites be multilingual. The increasing number of languages on
the internet is inevitable and can only boost multicultural exchanges. For this
to happen in the best possible circumstances, we still need to develop tools to
improve compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only
one example of what can be done." (translated by ML)
In 1998, Henk Slettenhaar was a professor at Webster University, Geneva,
Swizerland. Henk also insisted regularly on the need of bilingual websites, in
the original language and in English. He wrote in December 1998: "I see
multilingualism as a very important issue. Local communities that are on the web
should principally use the local language for their information. If they want to
present it to the world community as well, it should be in English too. I see a
real need for bilingual websites. I am delighted there are so many offerings in
the original language now. I much prefer to read the original with difficulty
than getting a bad translation."
He added in August 1999: "There are two main categories in my opinion. The first
one is the global outreach for business and information. Here the language is
definitely English first, with local versions where appropriate. The second one
is local information of all kinds in the most remote places. If the information
is meant for people of an ethnic and/or language group, it should be in that
language first with perhaps a summary in English. We have seen lately how
important these local websites are -- in Kosovo and Turkey, to mention just the
most recent ones. People were able to get information about their relatives
through these sites."
He added in August 2000: "Multilingualism has expanded greatly. Many e-commerce
websites are multilingual now and there are companies that sell products which
make localization possible (adaptation of websites to national markets)."
Non English-speaking users reached 50% in Summer 2000. According to the company
Global Reach, they were 52.5% in Summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in
April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (including 34.9% non-English-speaking
Europeans and 29.4% Asians) and 64.2% in March 2004 (including 37.9%
non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians).
1999: DIGITAL AUTHORS
[Two Experiences (published in 2000)]
I interviewed Murray Suid, a writer of educational books, who was living in Palo
Alto, California. Back in Paris, I interviewed Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author,
who wrote some interesting comments about digital literature.
= Murray Suid
In 1998, Murray Suid was living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He
was writing educational books, books for kids, multimedia scripts and
screenplays. He was among the first to choose a solution that many authors would
adopt then. He explained in September 1998: "If a book can be web-extended
(living partly in cyberspace), then an author can easily update and correct it,
whereas otherwise the author would have to wait a long time for the next
edition, if indeed a next edition ever came out. (...) I do not know if I will
publish books on the web -- as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that
will happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop
multimedia learning materials, and it is a form of teaching that I like a lot --
blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and -- when possible -- interactivity)."
Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we are now
web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products -- to update and enrich them." A
few months later, he added: "Our company -- EDVantage Software -- has become an
internet company instead of a multimedia (CD-ROM) company. We deliver
educational material online to students and teachers."
= Jean-Paul
In 1999, Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, was the webmaster of cotres.net, a
site telling stories in 3D. He really enjoyed the freedom given by online
publishing. He wrote in August 1999: "The internet allows me to do without
intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers and distributors. Most of
all, it allows me to crystallize what I have in my head: the print medium
(desktop-publishing, in fact) only allows me to partly do that. Then the
intermediaries will take over and I will have to look somewhere else, a place
where the grass is greener..." (translated by ML)
Jean-Paul added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all
directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links on a home
page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear).
You can do this in the print media, of course. But the difference is striking.
So the internet didn't change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't
write the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play.
But it wasn't exactly the internet that changed my writing, it was the first
model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself Hypercard. I still
remember how astonished I was during my month of learning about buttons and
links and about surfing by association, objects and images. Being able, by just
clicking on part of the screen, to open piles of cards, with each card offering
new buttons and each button opening onto a new series of them. In short,
learning everything about the web that today seems really routine was a
revelation for me. I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock
when they discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the labs of Rank Xerox.
Since then I have been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper print-out
only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give somebody who doesn't
like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It is only an approximation,
because print forces us into a linear relationship: the words scroll out page by
page most of the time. But when you have links, you have a different
relationship to time and space in your imagination. And for me, it is a great
opportunity to use this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a
book gives only a suggestion of it -- a vague one because a book is not meant
for that." (translated by ML)
1999: YOURDICTIONARY.COM
[A Story (published in 2001)]
After creating A Web of Online Dictionaries in 1995, Robert Beard co-founded
yourDictionary.com in 1999. He wrote in January 2000: "A Web of Online
Dictionaries (WOD) is now a part of yourDictionary.com (as of February 15,
2000). The new website is an index of 1,200+ dictionaries in more than 200
languages. Besides the WOD, the new website includes a word-of-the-day-feature,
word games, a language chat room, the old Web of On-line Grammars (now expanded
to include additional language resources), the Web of Linguistic Fun,
multilingual dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other
vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers, and other features;
dictionary indices. YourDictionary.com will hopefully be the premiere language
portal and the largest language resource site on the web. It is now actively
acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages with a particular focus on
endangered languages. It is overseen by a blue ribbon panel of linguistic
experts from all over the world."
Answering my question about multilingualism, Robert Beard added in January 2000:
"While English still dominates the web, the growth of monolingual non-English
websites is gaining strength with the various solutions to the font problems.
Languages that are endangered are primarily languages without writing systems at
all (only 1/3 of the world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do
not see the web contributing to the loss of language identity and still suspect
it may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more Native
Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars
of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For these people, the web
is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
Answering the same question, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle wrote in May 2001: "I would
emphasise the point that as regards the future of endangered languages, the
internet speeds everything up. If people don't care about preserving languages,
the internet and accompanying globalisation will greatly speed their demise. If
people do care about preserving them, the internet will be a tremendous help."
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle teaches computing - through the Gaelic language - at the
Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He also
maintains the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information
on Scottish Gaelic. He also maintains European Minority Languages, a list of
minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote in May
2001: "There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at
the Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat
screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, Gaelic
online terminology database. More hits on our web site. More use of sound.
Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now available continuously worldwide via
the internet. Major project has been translation of the Opera web-browser into
Gaelic - the first software of any size available in Gaelic."
Published by SIL International (SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics), The
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages.
A paper version and a CD-ROM are also available. Barbara Grimes was the editor
of the 8th to 14th editions, 1971-2000. She wrote in January 2000: "It is a
catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are
spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in,
alternate names, names of dialects, other socio-linguistic and demographic
information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index,
and language maps."
1999: OPEN EBOOK
[Few Words (published in 1999)]
There were too many formats. Nearly as many formats as eBooks.
A standard format was needed.
The first version of the Open eBook (OeB) specifications was released in
September 1999. There were a number of versions since then.
2000: ONLINE BIBLE OF GUTENBERG
[Few Words (published in 2000)]
The Bible of Gutenberg went online in November 2000, on the website of the
British Library.
As we all know, the Bible of Gutenberg is considered as the first print book.
Gutenberg printed it in 1454 or 1455 in Germany, may be in 180 copies, with 48
copies that would still exist in 2000.
Three copies - two full ones and one partial one - belong to the British
Library. The two full copies - a little different from each other - were
digitized in March 2000 by experts from the Keio University of Tokyo and NTT
(Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Communications).
2000: DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADERS
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks, Distributed Proofreaders was
launched online in March 2001 to help in the digitization of public domain
books. The method is to break up the tedious work of checking ebooks for errors
into small, manageable chunks. Originally meant to assist Project Gutenberg in
the handling of shared proofreading, Distributed Proofreaders has become the
main source of Project Gutenberg eBooks. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders
became an official Project Gutenberg site. The number of books processed through
Distributed Proofreaders has grown fast. In 2003, about 250-300 people were
working each day all over the world producing a daily total of 2,500-3,000
pages, the equivalent of two pages a minute. In 2004, the average was 300-400
proofreaders participating each day and finishing 4,000-7,000 pages per day, the
equivalent of four pages a minute. Distributed Proofreaders processed a total of
3,000 books in February 2004, 5,000 books in October 2004, 7,000 books in May
2005, 8,000 books in February 2006 and 10,000 books in March 2007, with the help
of 36,000 volunteers.
[More (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
The main "leap forward" of Project Gutenberg since 2000 is due to Distributed
Proofreaders. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project
Gutenberg site. In May 2006, Distributed Proofreaders became a separate entity
and continues to maintain a strong relationship with Project Gutenberg.
Volunteers don't have a quota to fill, but it is recommended they do a page a
day if possible. It doesn't seem much, but with hundreds of volunteers it really
adds up. In December 2007, five books were produced per day and there were
52,000 volunteers.
From the website one can access a program that allows several proofreaders to be
working on the same book at the same time, each proofreading on different pages.
This significantly speeds up the proofreading process. Volunteers register and
receive detailed instructions. For example, words in bold, italic or underlined,
or footnotes are always treated the same way for any book. A discussion forum
allows them to ask questions or seek help at any time. A project manager
oversees the progress of a particular book through its different steps on the
website.
The website gives a full list of the books that are: a) completed, i.e.
processed through the site and posted to Project Gutenberg; b) in progress, i.e.
processed through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through
their final proofreading and assembly; c) being proofread, i.e. currently being
processed. On August 3, 2005, 7,639 books were completed, 1,250 books were in
progress and 831 books were being proofread. On May 1st, 2008, 13,039 books were
completed, 1,840 books were in progress and 1,000 books were being proofread.
Each time a volunteer (proofreader) goes to the website, s/he chooses a book,
any book. One page of the book appears in two forms side by side: the scanned
image of one page and the text from that image (as produced by OCR software).
The proofreader can easily compare both versions, note the differences and fix
them. OCR is usually 99% accurate, which makes for about 10 corrections a page.
The proofreader saves each page as it is completed and can then either stop work
or do another. The books are proofread twice, and the second time only by
experienced proofreaders. All the pages of the book are then formatted, combined
and assembled by post-processors to make an eBook. The eBook is now ready to be
posted with an index entry (title, subtitle, author, eBook number and character
set) for the database. Indexers go on with the cataloging process (author's
dates of birth and death, Library of Congress classification, etc.) after the
release.
Volunteers can also work independently, after contacting Project Gutenberg
directly, by keying in a book they particularly like using any text editor or
word processor. They can also scan it and convert it into text using OCR
software, and then make corrections by comparing it with the original. In each
case, someone else will proofread it. They can use ASCII and any other format.
Everybody is welcome, whatever the method and whatever the format.
New volunteers are most welcome too at Distributed Proofreaders (DP),
Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Canada
(DPC). Any volunteer anywhere is welcome, for any language. There is a lot to
do. As stated on both websites, "Remember that there is no commitment expected
on this site. Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few
pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely
up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary
history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'."
2000: PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by biomedical
scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, from Stanford
University, Palo Alto, and University of California, Berkeley. Headquartered in
San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the
world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource. In early 2003, PLoS
created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide
scientists and physicians with high-quality, high-profile journals in which to
publish their most important work: PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS
Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS
Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases
(2007). All PLoS articles are freely available online, and deposited in the free
public archive PubMed Central. They can be freely redistributed and reused,
including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS
also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to
convert their existing journals to an open access model.
2001: WIKIPEDIA
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later
on), Wikipedia has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the
internet. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people
worldwide. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and
improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property
of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free
Documentation License). Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, which
runs a number of other projects, for example Wiktionary - launched in December
2002 - followed by Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikiquote. In December
2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles from 13,000 contributors in 100
languages. Two years later, in December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250
languages.
A printed collection of Wikipedia articles will be produced in September 2008 by
the major German publisher, Bertelsmann, entitled The One-Volume Wikipedia
Encyclopedia. The German-language website has more than 750,000 separate
articles. The printed volume will have only about 25,000, with 1,000
photographs. The printed work will include brief summaries (about 15 lines each)
that can fit in about 1,000 pages. There will be new editions if the 2008
edition is successful.
2002: MIT OPENCOURSEWARE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic
publishing initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to
promote open dissemination of knowledge and information. A pilot version of the
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) was available online in September 2002, with 32
course materials of MIT. In September 2003, the site was officially launched
with several hundred course materials. In March 2004, 500 course materials were
available in 33 different topics, and regularly updated. In May 2006, 1,400
course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five schools of
MIT. A steady state should be reached this year (2008), with the publishing of
1,800 course materials, virtually all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate
courses. In November 2005, the MIT launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW
Consortium) as a collaboration of educational institutions creating a broad body
of open educational content using a share model. One year later, the OCW
Consortium included the courses of 100 universities worldwide.
2004: CREATIVE COMMONS
[Overview (published in 2008)]
"Creative Commons" provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists,
and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to
carry. You can use Creative Commons to change your copyright terms from 'All
Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved'." (excerpt from the website) Launched
in 2004 by Larry Lessing, a professor at Stanford University, Creative Commons
is used a number of authors and some publishers, for example O'Reilly Media and
PLoS (Public Library of Science).
2004: PROJECT GUTENBERG EUROPE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
In January 2004, Project Gutenberg spread across the Atlantic with the launching
of Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP
Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental cultural and educational project
located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe uses the software of the original
Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe is a multilingual website, with its main
pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. In
April 2004, DP Europe was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60
languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all European languages. DP Europe
supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages. Unicode
is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any
language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book in May 2005 and its 400th
book in December 2006. DP Europe operates under "life +50" copyright laws. When
it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide eBooks for several national and/or
linguistic digital libraries.
[More (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
In 2004, multilingualism became one of the priorities of Project Gutenberg, like
internationalization. Michael Hart went off to Europe, with stops in Paris,
Brussels and Belgrade. In Belgrade, he met with the team of Project Rastko, to
support the creation of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (launched in December
2003) and Project Gutenberg Europe (launched in January 2004).
The launching of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko
was indeed a very important step. DP Europe uses the software of the original
Distributed Proofreaders and is dedicated to the proofreading of books for
Project Gutenberg Europe. Since its very beginnings, DP Europe has been a
multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European
languages by volunteer translators. DP Europe was available in 12 languages in
April 2004 and 22 languages in May 2008.
The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all the
European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide books for
several national and/or linguistic digital libraries. The goal is for every
country to have its own digital library (according to the country copyright
limitations), within a continental network (for France, the European network)
and a global network (for the whole planet).
A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting
project for Europe, and catalysed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western
Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need
to live in Europe to register). Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a
non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the
online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network
Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in
south-eastern Europe.
In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its 100th book.
In June 2005 Project Gutenberg Europe was launched with these first 100 books.
DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread books in numerous languages.
Created in 1991 and widely used since 1998, Unicode is an encoding system that
gives a unique number for every character in any language, contrary to the much
older ASCII that was meant only for English and a few European languages.
On August 3, 2005, 137 books were completed (processed through the site and
posted to Project Gutenberg Europe), 418 books were in progress (processed
through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through their final
proofreading and assembly), and 125 books were being proofread (currently being
processed). On May 10, 2008, 496 books were completed, 653 books were in
progress and 91 books were being proofread.
2004: GOOGLE PRINT / BOOK SEARCH
[Google Print (published in 2008)]
In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project
aimed at publishers, for users to be able to see snippets of their books and
order them online. The beta version of Google Print (http://print.google.com)
went on line in May 2005. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of
Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a digital library
of 15 million books by scanning and digitizing the collections of main
libraries, beginning with the Universities of Michigan (7 million books),
Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library. The planned cost
was an average of $10 per book, and $150 to $200 million dollars on ten years.
In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of
lawsuits filed by publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in
August 2006 under the new name of Google Book Search.
[Google Book Search (published in 2008)]
Google Book Search was launched in August 2006 to replace the controversial
Google Print, stopped in August 2005 because of main copyright concerns. Google
Book Search offers excerpts of books digitized by Google in the participating
libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia,
Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library). Google
scans 3,000 books a day, including copyrighted books. The inclusion of
copyrighted books is widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In
the US, lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American
Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is that the
full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes copyright laws, even
if only snippets are made freely available on the search engine. To counteract
copyright concerns and the problems of a closed platform, the Internet Archive
launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public
domain books and make them searchable and downloadable through any search
engine.
2005: OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive in early
2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It was launched in
October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit and governmental
organizations willing to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized
text and multimedia content. The project aims at digitizing public domain books
around the world and make them searchable through any web search engine and
downloadable for free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and
digitizes only public domain books, except when the copyright holder has
expressly given permission. The first contributors to OPA were the University of
California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National
Archives in the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives. The
digitized collections are freely available in the Text Archive of the Internet
Archive. In December 2006, they reached a milestone of 100,000 digitalized books
publicly available, with 12,000 new books added per month.
2006: MICROSOFT LIVE SEARCH BOOKS
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Microsoft has also participated in the Open Content Alliance (OCA), launched by
the Internet Archive in October 2005. In December 2006, Microsoft released the
beta version of Live Search Books. The book search engine performs keyword
searches for non copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft from the collections
of the British Library, University of California, and University of Toronto,
followed in January 2007 by the New York Public Library and Cornell University.
Books offer full text views and can be downloaded in PDF files. In the future,
Microsoft intends to add copyrighted works with the permission of their
publishers. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements with several main
publishers, including Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill.
2006: FREE WORLDCAT
[Overview (published in 2008)]
WorldCat was created in 1971 by the non-profit OCLC (Online Computer Library
Center) as the union catalog of the university libraries in the State of Ohio.
Over the years, OCLC became a national and worldwide library cooperative, and
WorldCat the largest library catalog in the world. In 2005, WorldCat had 61
million bibliographic records in 400 languages from 9,000 member libraries (paid
subscription) in 112 countries. In 2006, 73 million bibliographic records were
linking to 1 billion documents available in these libraries. In August 2006,
WorldCat began to migrate to the web through the beta version of the new website
WorldCat.org. Member libraries now provide free access to their catalogs and
electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full-text articles,
photos, music CDs and videos. Another pioneer site was RedLightGreen, launched
in Spring 2004 (with a beta version in Fall 2003) as the web version of the RLG
Union Catalog, another major union catalog created in 1980 by the Research
Libraries Group (RLG). RedLightGreen ended its service in November 2006, after a
successful 3-year run, and RLG joined OCLC.
[A Story (published in 1999)]
In 1998, two organizations - OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and RLIN
(Research Library Information Network) - were running international
bibliographical databases through the internet.
The OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a non-profit, membership, library
computer service and research organization dedicated to furthering access to the
world's information and reducing information costs. More than 27,000 libraries
in 65 countries were using OCLC services to manage their collections and to
provide online reference services. The website was available in English,
Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
OCLC services included: access services; collections and technical services;
reference services; resource sharing; Dewey Decimal Classification (published by
OCLC Forest Press); and preservation resources. From its headquarters in Dublin,
Ohio, OCLC operated one of the world's largest library information networks.
Libraries in the US joined OCLC through their OCLC-affiliated regional networks.
Libraries outside the US received OCLC services through OCLC Asia Pacific, OCLC
Canada, OCLC Europe, OCLC Latin America and the Caribbean, or via international
distributors.
OCLC was also running WorldCat - the name of the OCLC Online Union Catalog -
which is a merged electronic catalog of library catalogs around the world, and
the world's largest bibliographic database with its 38 million records (in early
1998) in 400 languages (with transliteration for non-Roman languages), and an
annual increase of 2 million records.
WorldCat stemmed from a concept which is the same for all union catalogs: earn
time to avoid the cataloguing of the same document by many catalogers worldwide.
When they are about to catalog a publication, the catalogers of the member
libraries search the OCLC catalog. If they find the record, they copy it in
their own catalog and add some local information. If they don't find the record,
they create it in the OCLC catalog, and this new record is immediately available
to all the catalogers of the member libraries worldwide.
Unlike RLIN, another main union catalog that accepts several records for the
same document (please see below), the OCLC Online Union Catalog accepts only one
record per document, and asks its members not to create duplicate records for
documents that were already cataloged. The records are created in USMARC format
(MARC: Machine Readable Catalog) according to the Anglo-American Cataloguing
Rules, 2nd version (AACR2).
What is the history of OCLC? "In 1967, the presidents of the colleges and
universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC)
to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic
institutions could share resources and reduce costs. OCLC's first offices were
in the Main Library on the campus of the Ohio State University (OSU), and its
first computer room was housed in the OSU Research Center. It was from these
academic roots that Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC's first president, oversaw the
growth of OCLC from a regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an
international network. In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the
governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become members and
participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the Ohio College Library
Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name of the corporation became OCLC
Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Today, OCLC serves more than 27,000
libraries of all types in the US and 64 other countries and territories."
(excerpt from the 1998 website)
In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records - with one record per document.
RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) had 88 million records - with
several records per document.
RLIN was run by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The central RLIN database
was a union catalog of 88 million items held in main libraries belonging to RLG
member institutions, including research and specialized libraries, like law,
technical, and corporate libraries.
RLIN included:
1) records that described works cataloged by the Library of Congress, the
National Library of Medicine, the US Government Printing Office, CONSER
(Conversion of Serials Project), the British Library, the British National
Bibliography, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and RLG
members and users;
2) nearly all the books cataloged since 1968 and rapidly expanding coverage for
older materials;
3) information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores, films,
videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections and
machine-readable data files;
4) unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United Nations'
DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index to pre-1950
commercial sound recordings;
5) international book vendors' in-process records, that were transferred to
bibliographers, acquisition services and catalogers, to order records or help
them for cataloguing items in their own local databases.
RLIN also provided:
1) A catalog of computer files. Machine-readable data files were useful to a
growing number of disciplines. RLIN contained records describing a number of
such files, from the full-text French literary works in the ARTFL Database to
the statistical data collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan;
2) A catalog of archives and special collections. The archival and manuscript
collections of research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical
societies contained essential primary resources, but information about their
contents was often elusive. Archivists and curators worked with RLG to create an
automated format for these collections. In 1998, there were 500,000 records
available in RLIN for archival collections located throughout North America.
These records described many collections by personal name, organization,
subject, and format.
RLIN also hosted the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), an invaluable
research tool for scholars in English culture, language, and literature. This
file provided extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress
materials printed in UK or any of its dependencies in any language, from the
beginnings of print to 1800 - as well as for materials printed in English
anywhere else in the world. Produced by the ESTC editorial offices at the
University of California, Riverside, and the British Library, in partnership
with the American Antiquarian Society and over 1,600 libraries worldwide, the
file was updated and expanded daily. ESTC served as a comprehensive bibliography
of the hand-press era and as a census of surviving copies. ESTC included 420,000
records as of June 1998, from the beginnings of print (1473) through the 18th
century - including materials ranging from Shakespeare and Greek New Testaments
to anonymous ballads, broadsides, songs, advertisements and other ephemera.
2007: CITIZENDIUM
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Citizendium was launched in October 2006 as a pilot project to build a new
encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who was the co-founder of
Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales) in January 2001, but resigned later on over policy
and content quality issues. Citizendium - which stands for a "citizen's
compedium of everything" - is a wiki project open to public collaboration, but
combining "public participation with gentle expert guidance". The project is
experts-led, not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, not anonymous
pseudonyms, and they are guided by expert editors. "Editors will be able to make
content decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working
shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors." (Larry Sanger, Toward a New
Compendium of Knowledge, September 2006) Constables make sure the rules are
respected. Citizendium was launched on March 25th, 2007, with 1,100 articles,
820 authors and 180 editors.
2007: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
[Overview (published in 2008)]
Launched in May 2007, the Encyclopedia of Life is a global scientific effort to
document all known species of animal and plants (1.8 million), and expedite the
millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued (8 to 10 million). This
collaborative effort is led by several main institutions: Field Museum of
Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri
Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).
The initial funding comes from the MacArthur Foundation (10 million dollars) and
the Sloan Foundation (2.5 million dollars). A number of pages will be available
by mid-2008. The encyclopedia will be operational in 3-5 years and completed
(with all known species) in 10 years. Built on the scientific integrity of
thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated
wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.
Copyright © 1999-2008 Marie Lebert
End of Project Gutenberg's Technology and Books for All, by Marie Lebert
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