In his e-mail of September 1, 1998, he explained the way he sees the relationship between the print media and the Internet:
"I certainly find both the print media and the Internet very useful, and am very excited about the potential of the Internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the Net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer."
Created by the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the
Universal Library Project is chaired by Raj Raddy. According to the website:
"The mission of the Universal Library Project is to start a worldwide movement to make available on the Internet all the Authored Works of Mankind so that anyone can access these works from any place at any time. This is a major new initiative in digital libraries that will build a technically realistic and economically practical infrastructure for putting and accessing library documents on the World Wide Web. In this regard, access to the Universal Library would be free and have the same stated goal as the Carnegie Library of the last century.
[It] has a vision that goes beyond the scope of most other digital library projects. Simply put, our goal is to spark a lasting movement, in which all of the institutions responsible for the collection of mankind's works will place these works on the Internet to educate and inspire all of the world's people. Our project will, therefore, serve as an umbrella over all of these efforts, with common indices, guidelines, and systems that allow the quickest, simplest access possible."
In summer 1998, The Universal Library was working on the Book Object project:
"The Universal Library Book Object is intended to let you read a book off the web the way you would like to read it, by giving you book presentation options. You can either download the whole book as a single HTML or ASCII MIME object. Download by the screen-full. Download by the section or chapter. You can have the book in HTML, in ASCII, in Postscript, in RTF, or image GIF. In short, you don't have to read the book in the same form in which it is stored on the remote server. Such conversion of original presentation format is already common in printer drivers, although we also provide a means to permission use.
To complement the users' freedom to read the book in the form in which they desire to read it, the Book Object also has complementary provisions by which a book owner can control or restrain the freedoms allowed. This includes not only presentation constraints, but also permission to print or permission that may require monetary payments. The Universal Library Book Object is still a work in progress, but we have now overcome a few of the more fundamental hurdles in establishing the question of its feasibility."
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