June 1997 > 82.3% English-speaking internet users
The percentage of English-speaking internet users decreased from nearly 100% in 1983 to 82.3% in June 1997. People from all over the world began to have access to the internet, and to post more and more webpages in their own languages. The first major study about language distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint initiative from Alis Technologies, a company specializing in language translation services, and the Internet Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage named "Web Languages Hit Parade". The main languages were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.
1997 > The digitization of print books
In 1997, a digital book meant scanning it, because most books existed only in print. To be viewed on the screen, a digitized book can be in "image format" or "text format". The "image format" is the photograph of the book page by page, as the digital facsimile of the print version. The original layout is preserved, and one can leaf through the book on the screen. The text format means scanning the book to get image files, then converting these image files into text files using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and if possible, as a second step, correcting the text on the screen by comparing both versions. A good OCR software is supposed to be 99% reliable, leaving a few errors per page. The text version of the book doesn't retain the original layout of the book or page. It allows a full-text search in the book, a main asset for an electronic book.
1997 > The Library 2000 project
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 the Digital Library Initiative's 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."
1997 > A digital library project for the British Library
The British Library was a pioneer in Europe as early as 1997. As explained on its website by Brian Lang, chief executive of the library: "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. (…) 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."
October 1997 > Gallica, the digital library of the French National
Library
The French National Library (BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France) launched its digital library Gallica in October 1997 as an experimental project to offer digitized texts and images from print collections related to French history, life and culture, beginning with the 19th century. It quickly became one of the largest digital libraries available on the internet. The books ranged from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, and were digitized as image files, for cost reasons. In December 2006, the Gallica collection included 90,000 books and periodicals, 80,000 images, and a number of sound files. Gallica also began converting image files of books into text files, to allow full-text searching. In March 2010, the revamped site of Gallica (launched in March 2008) reached one million documents, most of which are available for free.