1998: LIBRARIES TAKE OVER THE WEB
= [Overview]
The first library website was the one created by the Helsinki City Library in Finland, which went live in February 1994. Four years later, in 1998, more and more traditional libraries had a website as a new "virtual" window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf on a broad selection of websites on various topics. Libraries developed digital libraries alongside their standard collections, for a large audience to be able to access their specialized, old, local and regional collections, including images and sound. Librarians could now fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction - preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet). Library treasures went online, like Beowulf on the website of the British Library. Beowulf is the earliest known narrative poem in English, and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000, and digitized it for the world to enjoy.
= Libraries create websites
Libraries began creating websites as a "virtual" window, as well as digital libraries stemming from their print collections. Thousands of public works, literary and scientific articles, pictures and sound tracks became available on the screen for free.
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, without the need to go to the library and struggle through a lengthy process to access the original books, because of reduced opening hours, forms to fill out, safety concerns for rare and fragile books, and shortage of staff. Some researchers still remember the unfailing patience and an out-of-the-ordinary determination they needed to finally get to a given book in some cases. People could now access digital facsimiles, and access the original books only when needed.
Before broadband internet became mainstream, full-screen images were quite long to appear on the screen. After enthusiastically posting large image files, librarians decided to post small images that people could either see as is, or click on to get a larger format.
Some amazing image collections went online, for example American Memory, as "an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures".
SPIRO (Slide and Photograph Image Retrieval Online) was the Visual Online Public Access Catalog (VOPAC) for UC (University of California) Berkeley's Architecture Slide Library (ASL) collection of 200,000 35mm slides.
IMAGES 1 was the database of the Pictorial Collection at the National Library of Australia, with 15,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its influence in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs.
Librarians also helped patrons to surf on the web without being drowned, and to find the information they needed at a time search engines were less accurate. Library catalogs went online. Some patrons were already hoping that online catalogs would no longer only be a list of bibliographic records, and a prelude to a lengthy process to find the document itself if it didn't belong to their library - forms to fill out for interlibrary loan, fees to pay in some cases, and a long waiting period to finally get the book. They were hoping that, some day, bibliographic catalogs would give instant online access to the full text of books and journals.
= Gabriel in Europe
Gabriel - an acronym for "Gateway and Bridge to Europe's
National Libraries" - was launched as a trilingual (English,
French, German) website by the Conference of European National
Librarians (CENL).
As stated on the website in 1998: "Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose 'Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque' (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest theoretical works about libraries in any European language and provides a blueprint for the great modern research library. The name Gabriel is common to many European languages and is derived from the Old Testament, where Gabriel appears as one of the archangels or heavenly messengers. He also appears in a similar role in the New Testament and the Qu'ran."
In 1998, 38 national libraries participated in Gabriel: the
ones of Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, (Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia,
Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia,
San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
Turkey, United Kingdom, and Vatican City.
How did Gabriel begin? During the 1994 CENL meeting in Oslo, Norway, it was suggested that national libraries should set up a common electronic board with updates about their ongoing projects. Representatives from the national libraries of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), United Kingdom (British Library) and Finland (Helsinki University Library) met in March 1995 in The Hague, Netherlands, to launch the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries joined the project, the ones of Germany (Deutsche Bibliothek), France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa). Gabriel would describe their services and collections, while seeking to attract other national libraries into the project. The original Gabriel website was launched in September 1995. It was maintained by the British Library Network Services and mirrored by the national libraries of Netherlands and Finland.
In November 1995, other national libraries were invited to submit entries describing their services and collections. At the same time, more and more national libraries were launching their own websites and online catalogs. Gabriel also became a common portal for those.
During the 1996 CENL meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, it was decided that Gabriel would become an official CENL website in January 1997. Gabriel was maintained by the national library in the Netherlands, and mirrored by four other national libraries, in United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, and Slovenia.
Eight years later, in summer 2005, Gabriel merged with the European Library's website, as a common portal for the 43 national libraries in Europe. In March 2006, the European Commission launched the project of a European digital library, after a “call for ideas” from September to December 2005. This European digital library – named Europeana - opened its "virtual" doors in November 2008, with a crash from the server within 24 hours, followed by an experimental period with part of the collections.
In 1998, eight years before launching Europeana, the European Commission was running a Library Program(me) for public libraries, that aimed "to help increase the ready availability of library resources across Europe, and to facilitate their interconnection with the information and communications infrastructure. Its two main orientations will be the development of advanced systems to facilitate user access to library resources, and the interconnection of libraries with other libraries and the developing 'information highway'. Validation tests will be accompanied by measures to promote standards, disseminate results, and raise the awareness of library staff about the possibilities afforded by telematics systems."
In December 1998, according to a document posted on the website of the European Commission, 1,000 public libraries from 26 European countries had their own websites, that ranged from one webpage - with a postal address and opening hours - to several webpages - with full access to the library's OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) and a variety of services. The leading countries were Finland (247 libraries), Sweden (132 libraries), United Kingdom (112 libraries), Denmark (107 libraries), Germany (102 libraries), Netherlands (72 libraries), Lithuania (51 libraries), Spain (56 libraries), and Norway (45 libraries). Newcomers were the Czech Republic (29 libraries) and Portugal (3 libraries). Russia had a common website for 26 public reference libraries.
= Digital libraries
# A definition
What exactly is a digital library? The Universal Library Project, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, defined it in 1998 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."
Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous amount of data and make it available on the internet through a reliable search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and 1998 by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale online storage, using the digital library of the future as an example. It developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in 2000.
Another project was the Digital Library Initiative, supported by grants from NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). As mentioned on its website in 1998: "The Initiative's focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks - all in user-friendly ways."
The British Library was a pioneer in Europe. Brian Lang, chief executive of the library, explained on its website in 1998: "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 was expected to begin in 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."
Another pioneer in Europe was the French National Library (BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France). The BnF launched its digital library Gallica in October 1997 as an experimental project to offer digitized texts and images from print collections relating to French history, life and culture. When interviewed by Jérôme Strazzulla in the daily Le Figaro of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of BnF, 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." The first step of the program, a major collection of 19th- century French texts and images, was available online one year later.
# Some projects
In Germany, the Bielefeld University Library (Bibliothek der Universität Bielefeld) began posting online versions of German rare prints in 1996. Michael Behrens, in charge of the digital library project, wrote in September 1998: "To some here, 'digital library' seems to be everything that, even remotely, has to do with the internet. The library started its own web server some time in summer 1995. (…) Before that, it had been offering most of its services via Telnet, which wasn't used much by patrons, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material from home. But in those days almost nobody really had internet access at home… We started digitizing rare prints from our own library, and some rare prints which were sent in via library loan, in November 1996. (…)
In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting November 1996 and ending June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned as image files and made available via the web. During the same time, there were also a few digital materials prepared as accompanying material for lectures held at the university (image files as excerpts from printed works). These are, for copyright reasons, not available outside of campus. The next step, which is just being completed, is the digitization of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a German periodical from the Enlightenment, comprising 58 volumes, and 2,574 articles on 30,626 pages. A somewhat bigger digitization project of German periodicals from the 18th and early 19th century is planned. The size will be about 1,000,000 pages. These periodicals will be not just from the holdings of this library, but the project would be coordinated here, and some of the technical would be done here, also."
Other digital libraries were created from scratch, with no back up from a traditional library. They were "only" digital. This was the case of Athena in Switzerland, and Projetto Manuzio in Italy.
Athena was founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss teacher, and hosted on the website of the University of Geneva. Athena was created as a multilingual digital library specializing in philosophy, science, literature, history and economics, either by digitizing documents or by providing links to existing etexts. The Helvetia section provided documents about Switzerland. Geneva being the main city in French-speaking Switzerland, Athena also focused on putting French texts online. A specific page offered an extensive selection of other digital libraries worldwide, with relevant links.
Projetto Manuzio was launched by Liber Liber as as a free digital library for texts in Italian. Liber Liber is an Italian cultural association aimed at the promotion of any kind of artistic and intellectual expression. It wanted to link humanities and science by using computer technology in humanities. Projetto Manuzio was named after the famous 16th- century Venetian publisher who improved the printing techniques invented by Gutenberg.
As stated on its website in 1998, Projetto Manuzio wanted "to make a noble idea real: the idea of making culture available to everybody. How? By making books, graduation theses, articles, tales or any other document which could be digitized in a computer available all over the world, at any minute and free of charge. Via modem, or using floppy disks (in this case, by adding the cost of a blank disk and postal fees), it is already possible to get hundreds of books. And Projetto Manuzio needs only a few people to make such a masterpiece as Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia available to millions of people."
Some "only" digital libraries were organized around an author, for example The Marx/Engels Internet Archive (MEIA). MEIA was created in 1996 to offer a chronology of the collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and link this chronology to the digital versions of these works "as one work after another is brought online". As explained on the website in 1998: "There's no way to monetarily profit from this project. 'Tis a labor of love undertaken in the purest communitarian sense. The real 'profit' will hopefully manifest in the form of individual enlightenment through easy access to these classic works. Besides, transcribing them is an education in itself… Let us also add that this is not a sectarian/One-Great-Truth effort. Help from any individual or any group is welcome. We have but one slogan: 'Piping Marx & Engels into cyberspace!'"
A search engine was set up for the digital library. "As larger works come online, they will also have small search pages made for them alone - for instance, Capital will have a search page for that work alone."
The Biographical Archive gave access to biographies of Marx and Engels, as well as short biographies and photographs of their family members and friends. The Photo Gallery gathered photos of the Marx and Engels clan from 1839 to 1894, and their dwellings from 1818 to 1895, with "many more to come". The section “Others” included a list of works from all Marxist writers, for example James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon and Hal Draper, as well as a short biography. The Non-English Archive listed the works of Marx and Engels freely available online in other languages (Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish). It seems that the project was later renamed the Marxists Internet Archive.
= Library treasures go online
Libraries began digitizing their treasures, and putting the digital versions on the web for the world to enjoy. The British Library was a pioneer in this field. One of the first digitized treasures was Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English, and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the manuscript - some historians believe it might have been written circa 750. The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731. 18th-century transcripts mentioned hundreds of words and characters 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 British 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 researchers and readers worldwide.
The Electronic Beowulf Project was launched as a database of digital images of the Beowulf manuscript, as well as related manuscripts and printed texts. In 1998, the database included the fiber-optic readings of hidden characters and ultra-violet readings of erased text in the manuscript; the full electronic facsimiles of the 18th-century transcripts of the manuscript; and selections from the main 19th-century collations, editions and translations. Major additions to the database were planned for the following years, such as images of contemporary manuscripts, links to the Toronto Dictionary of Old English Project, and links to the comprehensive Anglo-Saxon bibliographies of the Old English Newsletter.
The database project was developed in partnership with two leading experts in the United States, Kevin Kiernan, from the University of Kentucky, and Paul Szarmach, from the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. Professor Kiernan edited the electronic archive and supervised the making of a CD-ROM with the main electronic images.
Brian Lang, chief executive of the British Library, explained on its website 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 digitization 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."
Other treasures of the British Library were available online as well: "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, sometimes referred to as the world's earliest print book; the "Sforza Hours", dated 1490-1520, an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the "Codex Arundel", a notebook from Leonardo Da Vinci, in the late 15th or early 16th century; and the "Tyndale New Testament", as the first print version in English by Peter Schoeffer in Worms.
New treasures followed. The digitized version of the Bible of Gutenberg was available online in November 2000. Gutenberg printed its Bible in 1454 or 1455 in Germany, perhaps printing 180 copies, with 48 copies still available in 2000, and three copies - two full ones and one partial one - at the British Library. The two full copies - a little different from each other - were digitized in March 2000 by Japanese experts from Keio University of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Communications). The images were then processed to offer a full digital version on the web a few months later.