From the Print Media to the Internet Part 9

"The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a.s.sembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, ma.n.u.scripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital ent.i.ties: bitonal doc.u.ment images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable texts."

There are currently over 30 collections in American Memory, for example:

(a) African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907: 351 rare pamphlets offering insight into att.i.tudes and ideas of African Americans between Reconstruction and the First World War;

(b) Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, 1935-1955: Approximately 29,000 photographs of buildings, interiors, and gardens of renowned architects and interior designers.

The New York Public Library Digital Collections provide the public with digital versions of books, ma.n.u.scripts, photographs, engravings, and other items as well as tools to browse, search, and a.n.a.lyze these materials remotely via the Internet. Four general sections allow the browsing of the collections: Digital Schomburg (Center for Research in Black Culture); Archival finding aids; Cooperative projects; and On-Line Exhibitions.

SPIRO (UC Berkeley Architecture/Slide Library Slide and Photograph Collection) is the visual on-line public access catalog (VOPAC) for the UC (University of California) Berkeley's Architecture Slide Library (ASL) collection of 200,000 35mm slides.

"SPIRO can be accessed using either Image Query, a powerful database retrieval package, or the World Wide Web. ImageQuery2.0 was developed originally by UC Berkeley's Information Systems and Technology, Advanced Technology Planning (ATP) Office under the direction of Barbara Morgan. ImageQuery2.0 is currently maintained by the Museum Informatics Project (MIP). ImageQuery SPIRO permits access to the collection by ten access points: period; place; creator name; object name; view type; subject terms from the Art and Architecture Thesaurus; source of image; creation dates; cla.s.sification number; image identification number. The vast majority of images in SPIRO are copyrighted."

IMAGES 1 (on-line images of the National Library of Australia's Pictorial Collection) contains over 15,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its place in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs. The images have been selected from more than 40,000 paintings, drawings and prints and more than 550,000 photographs held in the National Library's Pictorial Collection. Topics covered include first impressions of Australia, convict days, gold mining and Australian towns.

IMAGES 1 offers a number of search options to enhance access to the images including searching by the creator (for example photographer or artist; other names a.s.sociated with a work or collection; t.i.tle; subject; the image number in the database; and by format (for example, watercolor or photograph).

Founded in 1989 by Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, Corbis is a main provider of visual content and services in the digital age, offering more than 20 million photographs and fine-art images (and 1,3 on-line) for access worldwide via the Internet, on CD-ROM disc, and through traditional stock catalogs. The images includes contemporary stock photography, photojournalism, archival photography, and royalty-free images, available to both creative professionals and private consumers.

7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries

The quick development of digital libraries leads us to define the role of the digital library, a very recent concept, relating to the much older "traditional"

library, and vice versa.

In the same way that the paper doc.u.ment is not going to be "killed" by the electronic doc.u.ment, at least not in the near future, many librarians believe the "traditional" library is not going to be "killed" by the digital library.

When interviewed by Jerome Strazzulla in Le Figaro of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the French National Library (Bibliotheque nationale de France) 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".

Digital libraries give instant access to many works in the public domain. They also give instant access to old and rare texts and images. The full-screen images are still quite long to download, so many sites were backed up to present small images, so as not to ask too much from the cybernaut's patience. Most of the time a bigger format can be requested by clicking on the selected image.

This problem should be solved in the future with improvements in data transmission.

The digital libraries also further the textual research on one or several works at the same time, such as the works of Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy, different versions of The Bible, etc.

The major problem of the cyberlibrary is the fact that recent doc.u.ments cannot be posted because they don't belong to the public domain. Some projects, like DOI: The Digital Identifier System, an identification system for digital media, will enable automated copyright management systems.

Another problem is format harmonization, to allow the downloading of the texts by any hardware and software. Libraries often choose the ASCII format (ASCII: American standard code for information interchange) or the SGML format (SGML: standard generalized markup language).

Many organizations are involved in research relating to digital libraries.

Sponsored by the The Library of UC Berkeley and Sun Microsystems, SunSITE is the site where the Berkeley Digital Library builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to others doing the same. Its contents are: catalogs and indexes; help/search tools and administrative info; Java corner; teaching and training; text and image collections; information for digital library developers; research and development: where digital libraries are being built; tools: software for building digital libraries.

The Digital Library Technology (DLT) Project supports the development of new technologies to facilitate public access to the data of NASA (National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration) via computer networks, particularly technologies that develop tools, applications, and software and hardware systems that are able to scale upward to accommodate evolving user requirements and order-of-magnitude increases in user access.

The Stanford Universities Digital Libraries Project deals primarily with computing literature, with a strong focus on networked information sources. It is one partic.i.p.ant among five universities of the Digital Library Initiative, supported by the NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and NASA (National Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration). "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."

Library 2000 gives the historical record of a project held by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology) between Fall 1995 and February 1998. Library 2000 was a computer systems research project that explored the implications of large-scale on-line storage using the future electronic library as an example. The project was pragmatic, developing a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in the year 2000.

Based at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), the D-Lib Program supports the community of people with research interests in digital libraries and electronic publis.h.i.+ng. D-Lib Magazine, the magazine of digital library research, is a monthly compilation of contributed stories, commentary, and briefings.

The International Federation of Library a.s.sociations and Inst.i.tutions (IFLA) provides a very interesting section Electronic Collections and Services.

8. ON-LINE CATALOGS

[In this chapter:]

[8.1. Library Catalogs / 8.2. International Bibliographic Databases / 8.3.

Future Trends for On-line Catalogs]

Why a whole chapter on catalogs? Because, even if most of them are not yet user-friendly and are still in the domain of information specialists, they are essential to students, researchers, and anybody who needs a particular doc.u.ment or wants to know more about a specific topic.

Until now, the catalogs could easily be reproached as being complicated to deal with, and above all for giving the references of the doc.u.ments but never giving access to their contents and full-text. All this is now changing. Catalogs on the Web have become more attractive and user-friendly. And, in an emerging trend, catalogs have begun to give instant access to some doc.u.ments, for example, the works listed in The Universal Library which can be accessed through the Experimental Search System (ESS) of the Library of Congress.

8.1. Library Catalogs

Two catalogs, those of The British Library and the Library of Congress, are impressive bibliographic tools, freely available to all Internet users. They include many doc.u.ments published in non-English languages.

In May 1997, The British Library launched OPAC 97, which provides free access via the World Wide Web to the catalogs of the major British Library collections in London and Boston Spa. For a wider range of databases and many additional facilities, the British Library offers Blaise, an on-line bibliographic information service (which you must pay for), and Inside, article t.i.tle records from 20,000 journals and 16,000 conferences. As explained on the website:

"The Library's services are based on its outstanding collections, developed over 250 years, of over one hundred and fifty million items representing every age of written civilisation, every written language and every aspect of human thought.

At present individual collections have their own separate catalogues, often built up around specific subject areas. Many of the Library's plans for its collections, and for meeting its users' needs, require the development of a single catalogue database. This is being pursued in the Library's Corporate Bibliographic Programme which seeks to address this issue."

The reference collections represented on OPAC 97 comprise:

a) Modern books and periodicals from Britain and overseas;

b) Humanities and Social Sciences collection (from 1975), which include: humanities and social sciences information; popular science and psychology holdings; modern oriental holdings; rich resources relating to Africa; Hispanic materials relating to Spain, Portugal, Portuguese North Africa and Latin America; one of Europe's largest collection relating to Slavonic, East European and Soviet studies;

c) Science, Technology and Business collection (from 1975);

d) Music collection (1980- ), one of the world's finest collections of printed music;

e) Older books and periodicals from Britain and overseas;

f) Older reference material collection (to 1975 only), incomparable holdings of early printing from Britain and overseas Western and Oriental materials from the beginning of writing, including: archives and materials a.s.sembled by the former India Office; rich resources relating to Africa; Hispanic materials relating to Spain, Portugal, Portuguese North Africa and Latin America (one of Europe's largest collections relating to Slavonic, East European and Soviet studies); historical resources for scientific, technological and business information; and musical works.

The Doc.u.ment Supply collections represented on OPAC 97 are comprised of:

a) Books and reports collection (from 1980), which covers millions of British and overseas books, reports and UK theses;

b) Journals/Serials collection (from 1700), including half a million British and overseas periodicals (journals and serials);

c) Conference collection (from 1800), which is the world's largest collection of conference proceedings.