Chapter 5

"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."

Thanks to the digital library, the "traditional" library can finally join two goals which used to be in contradiction - document preservation and document communication. On the one hand, the documents are taken out of their shelves only once to be scanned. On the other, the public can access them from the screen, and easily go from one document to another, without a long waiting period or the need to fill out forms.

The UNOG (United Nations of Geneva) Library, a leading European center for the study of world affairs, is open to UN staff, scholars, researchers, diplomats, journalists, and students. Its outstanding collections are especially strong on disarmament, economics, human rights, international law and current events. On July 3, 1997, the UNOG Library inaugurated its new Cyberspace. Initiated by Pierre Pelou, the Head of the Library, this electronic forum is primarily intended to benefit representatives of the Permanent Missions, conference delegations and international civil servants. It is also open to specialized researchers, students, engineers and other interested professionals.

Designed and planned by Antonio Bustamante, architect and Head of the Buildings, Parks and Gardens Unit, the cyberspace is comprised of 24 computerized workstations that have been installed on the redesigned first floor of the UNOG Library to provide the following services:

a) Access to a broad range of electronic resources, such as: the Internet; the United Nations Optical Disk System; an infoserver with about 50 networked CD-ROMs; the United Nations Bibliographical Information System (UNBIS), the shared database of the Headquarters Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the UNOG Library; the UNOG Library's automated catalogue; Profound, a collection of databases in the business and economics field; and the catalogue of RERO (Réseau des bibliothèques romandes et tessinoises), a network of Swiss libraries with which the UNOG Library is affiliated;

b) Consultation of a selection of multimedia CD-ROMs composed of intertwined audio, textual, photographic and video segments (e.g. Encarta 97, dictionaries and encyclopedias, l'État du monde, Élysée 2, Nuklear);

Viewing of multistandard videocassettes and DVDs (digital versatile disks) of documentaries and films on topics of international relevance (e.g. humanitarian affairs, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi);

Usage of computerized working tools for text-processing (WordPerfect) and electronic mail (e-mail, cc:mail); and

Access to the Internet, particularly the UNOG homepages in English and French, the homepages of Permanent Missions and other international organizations, and a selection of links provided by the managers of the UNOG Cyberspace.

A second cyberspace with six computers opened in April 1998 on the second floor of the library, with the same facilities and a fantastic view on the Lake of Geneva and the surrounding Alps.

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization based in Paris, has been quick to put the Internet at its staff's disposal, and to create on extensive Intranet. Peter Raggett, Deputy-Head of the OECD Main Library, made the following comments in his e-mail of June 18, 1998:

"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. Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on 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.

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.

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."

The Internet in libraries is a research topic dealt with by numerous organizations, for example the Internet Public Library (IPL) or the International Federation of Library Institutions and Associations (IFLA).

Opened in March 1995, the Internet Public Library (IPL) is the first digital public library of and for the Internet community. Its different sections are: reference; exhibits; especially for librarians; magazines and serials; newspapers; on-line texts; and Web searching. There are also sections for Teen and Youth. All the items of the collections (20,166 as of December 8, 1998) are carefully selected, catalogued and described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library, IPL also tries to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)is a worldwide, independent organization created to provide librarians around the world with a forum for exchanging ideas, promoting international cooperation, research and development in all fields of library activity. IFLA's objectives are: to represent librarianship in matters of international interest; to promote the continuing education of library personnel; and to develop, maintain and promote guidelines for library services. The part relating to Electronic Collections and Services includes four sections: library and information science; digital libraries; information policy; and Internet and networking.

A number of professional magazines are available on the Web.

Library Journal Digital (LJ Digital) is an electronic offshoot of Library Journal (LJ), founded in 1876 and the oldest U.S. independent national library publication. LJ is read by over 100,000 library directors, administrators, and others in public, academic, and special (e.g., business) libraries. Published 20 times a year, LJ combines news, features, and commentary with analyses of public policy, technology, and management developments. In addition, some 7,500 evaluative reviews (of books, audio and video, CD-ROMs, websites, and magazines) written by librarians help readers make their purchasing decisions. Each issue reviews 250 to 350 adult books, mostly prior to publication, making it a source for librarians and publishers' early evaluations.

Published by the University of Houston Libraries, Texas, the Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review) is an electronic journal about end-user computer systems in libraries. It is distributed at no charge on the Internet and other computer networks to 8,000 persons in 60 countries. The journal publishes papers on topics such as digital libraries, document delivery systems, electronic publishing, expert systems, hypermedia and multimedia systems, locally mounted databases, network-based information resources and tools, and on-line catalogs.

The librarian's job has significantly changed with computers, and continues to change with the Internet. Computers made the catalogs much easier to handle. In place of all these paper cards to be classified into wood or metal drawers, the computer could sort out the bibliographic records itself. The loan of documents and the processing of orders became computerized too. Then networking computers allowed the creation of union catalogs for a region, a country, or a specific topic, furthering interlibrary loan.

What does the Internet bring to librarians, libraries and library users? It brings:

- the use of electronic mail for internal and external communications, and as a means of communication with the public;

- the participation in newsgroups and discussion forums;

- the use of the library website to give additional information, open a digital library, and offer a selection of sites relating to the public's topics;

- free access to the library's catalogues;

- a gigantic information provider; and

- a simpler way to look for another job.

With the Internet as a main information provider and the quick development of digital libraries, what is the future of librarians? Will they become cyberlibrarians, or will they disappear because the public will not need them any more when all the information and documents they need will be available on-line?

As for journalists, the librarians will probably continue being useful, as stated by Peter Raggett, Deputy-Head of the OECD Library, in his e-mail of September 18, 1998:

"I have to filter the information for my clients. This means that I must be familiar with the sites which contain useful links. In addition 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."

7. DIGITAL LIBRARIES

[In this chapter:]

[7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition / 7.2. Digital Libraries: Some Examples / 7.3. Digital Image Collections / 7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries]

7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition

Digital libraries may be the major contribution from the print media to the Internet, and vice versa.

Thanks to the Internet, hundreds of public works, literary and scientific documents, articles, academic and research works, pictures and sound tracks are available on the screen for free. The collections of existing digital libraries increase regularly, and new digital libraries come up constantly.

Some digital libraries are created by "traditional" libraries who want to put their documents at the disposal of Internet users. Other digital libraries are "only" digital - their life is 100% on the Web.

Hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Universal Library defines the digital library as "a digital library of digital documents, artifacts, and records. The advantage of having library material available in digital form is threefold: (1) the content occupies less space and can be replicated and made secure electronically, (2) the content can be made immediately available over the Internet to anyone, anywhere, and (3) search for content can be automated. The promise of the digital library is the promise of great cost reductions while providing great increases in archive availability and accessibility. [...]

There are literally thousands of digital library initiatives of a great many varieties going on in the world today. Digital libraries are being formed of scholarly works, archives of historical figures and events, corporate and governmental records, museum collections and religious collections. Some take the form of scanning and putting documents to the World Wide Web. Still other digital libraries are formed of digitizing paintings, films and music. Work even exists in 3D reconstructive digitization that permits a digital deconstruction, storage, transmission, and reconstruction of solid object."

The British Library is a pioneer in Europe for research relating to digital libraries. Some treasures of the library are already on-line: Beowulf, the first great English masterpiece dated 11th century; Magna Carta, one example from 1215 issued over the Great Seal of King John; the Lindisfarne Gospels, dated 698; the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, which is the world's earliest printed book; the Sforza Hours, dated 1490-1520, which is an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the Codex Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), and the Tyndale New Testament, which was the first printed New Testament in English, from the press of Peter Schoeffer in Worms.

Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, states on the British Library website:

"We do not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the future. Others anticipate that the impact will be slight. In the context of the British Library, printed books, manuscripts, maps, music, sound recordings and all the other existing materials in the collection will always retain their central importance, and we are committed to continuing to provide, and to improve, access to these in our reading rooms. 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 Digital Library Programme will begin in February 1999. The two potential partners are: Dawson-IBM-The Stationery Office Consortium, and the Digital Library Consortium (Blackwell, Chadwyck-Healey, MicroPatent, Unisys). The confirmation of the preferred bidder is planned for February 1999, and the contract will be awarded in Spring 1999.

"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."

What exactly is digitization? Digitization is the conversion of text, sound or images to digital form, that is, in the form of numerical digits (bits and bytes) for handling by computer. Digitization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without separate material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs, rather than simply books and records.

7.2. Digital Libraries: Some Examples

Created by Michael S. Hart in 1971, the Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the Internet. It is now the oldest digital library on the Web, and the biggest in terms of the number of works (1,500) which have been digitized for it, with around 45 new titles per month. Michael Hart's purpose is to put on the Web as many literary texts as possible for a minimal price.

In his e-mail of August 23, 1998, Michael Hart explained:

"We consider Etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to Etexts, especially in schools. [...] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 Etexts on the Net, and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average Etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%... thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 Etexts to 1,000 time as many... a trillion and a quadrillion in US terminology."

The Etext # 1000 was Dante's Divine Comedy, in both English and Italian, and Michael Hart dreams about Etext # 2000 for January 1st, 2000. In the Project Gutenberg Newsletter of February 1998, he wrote: "If we do 36 per month for the next 23 month period, we should be able to reach 2,000 Etexts by January 1 of the year 2000. . . [...] I think it would be kind of nice to do our 2,000th Etext during the big celebration..."

An average of 50 hours is necessary to get any Etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright-searched, analyzed, etc.

How did Project Gutenberg begin?

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of "normal computing", that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given... so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. He immediately announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. He then proceeded to type in the Declaration of Independence and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. Project Gutenberg was born.

There are three sections in the Project Gutenberg, basically described as:

- Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.;

- Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.; and

- References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.

"The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an Etext to Peter Pan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg Etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Kahn; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries.

We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy to find Etext format.

With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire library, without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program. In fact, these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain that you can do a search on them without even using an intermediate search program (i.e. a program between you and the disk). Norton's and other direct disk access programs can search every one of your files without you even naming them, pointing to an Etext directory, or whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk. . .I do this on a half gigabyte disk partition, containing all our editions."

In this same spirit, Project Gutenberg selects Etexts that large portions of the audience will want and use frequently. It has also avoided requests, demands, and pressures to create authoritative editions.

"We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release Etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level, before the end of the year 2001, when we are scheduled to complete our 10,000 book Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library."

"Anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely." The Project Gutenberg Philosophy uses this premise to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as 'Plain Vanilla ASCII', meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files." Plain Vanilla ASCII thus addresses the audience with Apples and Ataris all the way to the old homebrew Z80 computers, not to mention the audience of Mac, UNIX and mainframers. Michael Hart explains: