From the Print Media to the Internet Part 8

The contents are:

- E-zines: electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal;

- Politics: political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups;

- Fiction: publications of amateur authors;

- Religion: mainstream and off-beat religious texts;

- Poetry: an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and

- Quartz: the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.

The ETEXT Archives were founded in the Summer of 1992 by Paul Southworth, and hosted by the User Services Department of the University of Michigan's Information Technology Division.

"The Web was just a glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was still the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast majority of users. The origin of the project has caused numerous people to a.s.sociate it with the University of Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official relations.h.i.+p and the project is supported entirely by volunteer labor and contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the project maintainers.

The project was started in response to the lack of organized archiving of political doc.u.ments, periodicals and discussions disseminated via Usenet on newsgroups such as alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came later and was also a substantial source of both materials and regular contributors.

Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines (e-zines) began their rapid proliferation on the Internet, and it was clear that these materials suffered from the same lack of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the fact that the lines between e-zines (which at the time were mostly related to hacking, phreaking, and Internet anarchism) and political materials on the Internet were fuzzy enough that most e-zines fit the original mission of The ETEXT Archives.

One thing led to another, and e-zines of all kinds -- many on various cultural topics unrelated to politics -- invaded the archives in significant volume."

The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word multilingual library with a ma.s.sive database (325,916,827 words as of December 10, 1998) containing multilingual novels, technical literature and translated texts.

Logos, an international translation company based in Modena, Italy, gives free access to the linguistic tools used by its translators: 200 translators at its headquarters and 2,500 translators on-line all over the world, who process around 200 texts per day. Apart from the Logos Wordtheque, the tools include the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 entry words (as of December 10, 1998); Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Universal Conjugator, a database for conjugation of verbs in 17 languages.

When interviewed by Annie Kahn in the French daily newspaper Le Monde of December 7, 1997, Rodrigo Vergara, the Head of Logos, explained:

"We wanted all our translators to have access to the same translation tools. So we made them available on the Internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also gave us a lot of exposure. The operation has in fact attracted a great number of customers, but also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to the contacts made in the wake of the initiative."

In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote:

"The Logos site is much more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other on-line dictionaries. A system cornerstone is the doc.u.ment search software, which processes a corpus of literary texts available free of charge on the Web. If you search for the definition or the translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get not only the answer sought, but also a quote from one of the literary works containing the word (in our case, an essay by Voltaire). All it takes is a click on the mouse b.u.t.ton to access the whole text or even to order the book, thanks to a partners.h.i.+p agreement with Amazon.com, the famous on-line book shop. Foreign translations are also available. If however no text containing the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending the user to other websites concerning the term in question. In the case of certain words, you can even hear the p.r.o.nunciation.

If there is no translation currently available, the system calls on the public to contribute. Everyone can make their own suggestion, after which Logos translators and the company verify the translations forwarded."

Begun in 1997, Gallica is a ma.s.sive undertaking by the Bibliotheque nationale de France to digitize thousands of texts and images relating to French history, life and culture. The first step of the program - the pictures and the texts of French 19th century - is now available on the Web.

Many organizations have a digital library organized around a subject. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information on-line, as well as to promote responsibility in new media, run the EFF Archives, with doc.u.ments on civil liberties.

Are there only English texts on the Web? Not any longer - what was true at the beginning of the Internet, when it was a network created in the US before becoming worldwide, is not true any more. More and more digital libraries are offering texts in languages other than English.

Project Gutenberg is now developing its foreign collections, as announced in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997. In the Newsletter of March 1998, Michael Hart, its founder and executive director, mentioned that Project Gutenberg's volunteers were now working on Etexts in French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and he was also expecting to have some coming in the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, j.a.panese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, and Valencian (Catalan).

Founded in 1993, the ABU: la bibliotheque universelle (ABU: The Universal Library) offers a collection of French-language texts of public domain. It gives free access to 223 texts and 76 authors (as of November 1998).

Located on the site of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, Athena is a digital library of doc.u.ments in several languages about philosophy, science, cla.s.sics, literature, history, economics, etc. It also focuses on putting French texts at the disposal of the Internet community. The Helvetia section gathers doc.u.ments about Switzerland. The site offers links to other digital libraries.

The Bielefeld University Library (Bibliothek der Universitat Bielefeld), Germany, is a collection of German digitized texts. Michael Behrens, responsible for the digital library, answered to my questions in his e-mail of September 25, 1998.

ML: "When did you begin your digital library?"

MB: "[It] depends on what the term would be understood to mean. 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.

There's no exact date to give because it took some time until we got 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 patrons, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material from home. But in those days almost n.o.body really 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."

ML: "How many digitized texts do you have?"

MB: "In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting Nov. 1997 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, 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."

Projekt Gutenberg-DE is a German digital library created in 1994 because there were very few German texts on the Web. Texts are organized for reading on-line with longer works divided into chapters. There is an alphabetic list of authors, with for each a biography and a list of works, and a full text search for t.i.tles.

In Italy, Liber Liber, whose maxim is: "Nullus amicus magis liber quam liber", is a non-profit cultural a.s.sociation whose aim is the promotion of any kind of artistic and intellectual expression. In particular, it is an attempt to draw humanistic and scientific culture together thanks to the qualified use of computer technologies in the humanistic field.

Liber Liber promotes the Manuzio project (projetto Manuzio), a collection of electronic texts in Italian which was renamed after the famous publisher from Venice who in the 16th century improved the printing techniques created by Gutenberg.

The Manuzio project has the ambition to make a n.o.ble idea real: the idea of making culture available to everybody. How? By making books, graduation theses, articles, tales or any other doc.u.ment which can be memorized by a computer available all over the world, at any minute and free-of-charge. Via modem, or using floppy disks (in which case there is only the cost of the disk and the delivery), 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.

Created by the University of Virginia and the University of Pittsburgh, the j.a.panese Text Initiative (JTI) is a collaborative effort to make texts of cla.s.sical j.a.panese literature available on the World Wide Web. The goal of the j.a.panese Text Initiative (JTI) is "to put on-line on the Web texts of cla.s.sical j.a.panese literature in j.a.panese characters. Our primary audience is English-speaking scholars and students. Where possible, the j.a.panese texts will be accompanied by English translations. All JTI texts will be tagged in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), according to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards, and converted to HTML for display on the Web. An important purpose is to make JTI texts in both j.a.panese and English searchable, both individually and as a group." Venezuela a.n.a.litica, an electronic magazine, conceived as a public forum to exchange ideas on politics, economics, culture, science and technology, created in May 1997 BitBlioteca, a digital library which comprises about 700 texts mainly in Spanish, and also in French, English and Portuguese.

In his e-mail of September 3, 1998, Roberto Hernandez Montoya, Head of BitBlioteca, explains the way he sees the relations.h.i.+p between the print media and the Internet:

"The printed text can't be replaced, at least not for the foreseeable future.

The paper book is a tremendous 'machine'. We can't leaf through an electronic book in the same way as a paper book. On the other hand electronic use allows us to locate text chains more quickly. In a certain way we can more intensively read the electronic text, even with the inconvenience of reading on the screen.

The electronic book is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (if we don't count the cost of the computer and the Internet connection).

[The use of the Internet] has been very important for me personally. It became my main way of life. As an organization it gave us the possibility to communicate with thousands of people, which would have been economically impossible if we had published a paper magazine. I think the Internet is going to become the essential means of communication and of information exchange in the coming years."

Projekt Runeberg is a digital library initiated in December 1992 by Lysator, a students' computer club, in cooperation with the Linkoping University, Sweden.

It is an open and voluntary initiative to create and collect free electronic editions of cla.s.sic Nordic literature and art. Around 200 t.i.tles are available in full text, and there is also data on more than 6,000 Nordic authors.

Some digital libraries are organized around an author, for example The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Dante Project or The Marx/Engels Internet Archive (MEIA).

Begun in 1996, The Marx/Engels Internet Archive (MEIA) "is continually expanding, as one work after another is brought on-line [...] Pictures/photos now adorn the site, with many more to come". The Marx & Engels WWW Library gives a chronology of the collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and access to a number of them. The Photo Gallery presents the Marx and Engels clan from 1839 to 1894, and their dwellings from 1818 to 1895.

The MEIA Search allows searching in the entire Marx/Engels Internet Library. "As larger works come on-line, 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 gives access to biographies of Marx and Engels, and also short notices and photographs of the members of their family and their friends.

The link "Others" gives access to a short biography and the works of Marxist writers, including: James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon, andHal Draper. The MEIA Non-English Archive lists the works of Marx and Engels in other languages (Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, j.a.panese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish), with links to them. The following statement is posted on the website:

"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 cla.s.sic works. Besides, transcribing them is an education in itself... Let me 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 cybers.p.a.ce!'"

7.3. Digital Image Collections

Other digital libraries include pictures, for example the impressive Gallica.

Available since 1997, Pictures and Texts of French 19th Century are the first part of the ma.s.sive project of the French National Library (Bibliotheque nationale de France) which is digitizing thousands of texts and images relating to French history, life and culture.

The digital collections of American Memory are a major component of the Library of Congress's National Digital Library Program. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the Library of Congress, including photographs, ma.n.u.scripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures.