It depends what you understand this term to mean. To some here, "digital library" seems to be everything even remotely to do with the Internet. The library started its own web server in summer 1995. There's no exact date because it took some time for us to get it to work in a reasonably reliable way. Before that, it had been offering most of its services via Telnet, which wasn't used much by customers, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material from home. But in those days hardly anybody had Internet access at home. We started digitizing rare prints from our own library, and some that were sent in via library loan, in November 1996.
= How many digitized texts do you have?
In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting in November 1996 and ending in June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned as image files and made available on the Web. In the same period, 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 the 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 — 2,574 articles on 30,626 pages.
A rather bigger project to digitize German periodicals from the 18th and early 19th century is planned. This will involve about a million pages. These periodicals will be not just be from this library's stock, but the project would be coordinated here and some of the technical work done here too.
GUY BERTRAND & CYNTHIA DELISLE (Montreal)
#Respectively scientific director and consultant at the CEVEIL (Centre d'expertise et de veille inforoutes et langues - Centre for Assessment and Monitoring of Information Highways and Languages)
The CEVEIL, set up in 1995, is a non-profit-making body based in Quebec whose main purpose is to think about the use and processing of languages on information highways, from a French-language viewpoint, through strategic monitoring activity and creating a network of exchanges and evaluation. The CEVEIL also focuses on the language industry in general (voice recognition, machine translation and optical character recognition, for example) and related fields such as strategic management of data, knowledge management, setting norms and standardisation. The CEVEIL is part of the CEFRIO (Centre francophone d'information des organisations - French-language Centre for Information on Organisations).
*Interview of August 23, 1998 (original interview in French)
= What did using the Internet affect the CEVEIL?
First, the Web is one of the reasons for CEVEIL's existence, because we focus on things like language use and processing on the Internet.