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Title: Technology and Books for All
Author: Lebert, Marie
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Technology and Books for All" ***
TECHNOLOGY AND BOOKS FOR ALL
MARIE LEBERT
Updated Version
NEF, University of Toronto, 2008
Copyright © 2008 Marie Lebert
-----
milestones and as many pages, with an overview and an in-depth
description for each milestone. This book is also available in French,
with a different text. Both versions are available on the NEF
.
-----
Marie Lebert is a researcher and journalist specializing in technology
and books, other media and languages. She is the author of Les
mutations du livre (Mutations of the Book, in French, 2007) and Le
Livre 010101 (The 010101 Book, in French, 2003). All her books have
been published by NEF (Net des études françaises / Net of French
Studies), University of Toronto, Canada, and are freely available
online at .
-----
Most quotations are excerpts from NEF interviews. With many thanks to
all the persons who are quoted here, and who kindly answered my
questions over the years. Most interviews are available online at
.
----
With many thanks to Greg Chamberlain, Laurie Chamberlain, Kimberly
Chung, Mike Cook, Michael Hart and Russon Wooldridge, who kindly edited
mother tongue is French, is responsible for any remaining mistakes.
----
TABLE
Introduction
1968: ASCII
1974: Internet
1977: UNIMARC
1984: Copyleft
1990: Web
1991: Unicode
1993: Online Books Page
1993: PDF
1994: Library Websites
1994: Bold Publishers
1995: Amazon.com
1995: Online Press
1996: Palm Pilot
1996: Internet Archive
1996: New Ways of Teaching
1997: Digital Publishing
1997: Logos Dictionary
1997: Multimedia Convergence
1998: Online Beowulf
1998: Digital Librarians
1998: Multilingual Web
1999: Open eBook Format
1999: Digital Authors
2000: yourDictionary.com
2000: Public Library of Science
2001: Wikipedia
2001: Creative Commons
2002: MIT OpenCourseWare
2004: Google Books
2005: Open Content Alliance
2006: Microsoft Live Search Books
2006: Free WorldCat
2007: Citizendium
2007: Encyclopedia of Life
Websites
INTRODUCTION
Michael Hart, who founded LibraryBlog in 1971, wrote: "We
consider eText to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper,
other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can
possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to
eTexts, especially in schools." (excerpt from a NEF interview, August
1998)
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1989-90, wrote: "The dream
behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate
by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a
hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global,
be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream,
too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a
realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in
which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of
our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us
analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit
in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from: The World Wide
Web: A Very Short Personal History, May 1998)
John Mark Ockerbloom, who created The Online Books Page in 1993, wrote:
"I've gotten very interested in the great potential the net had for
making literature available to a wide audience. (...) I 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." (excerpt from a NEF
interview, September 1998)
Here is the journey we are going to follow:
1968: ASCII is a 7-bit coded character set.
1971: LibraryBlog is the first digital library.
1974: The internet takes off.
1977: UNIMARC is set up as a common bibliographic format.
1984: Copyleft is a new license for computer software.
1990: The web takes off.
1991: Unicode is a universal double-byte character set.
1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free eBooks.
1993: The PDF format is launched by Adobe.
1994: The first library website goes online.
1994: Publishers put some of their books online for free.
1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore.
1995: The mainstream press goes online.
1996: The Palm Pilot is the first PDA.
1996: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web.
1996: Teachers explore new ways of teaching.
1997: Online publishing begins spreading.
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free.
1997: Multimedia convergence is the topic of an international
symposium.
1998: Library treasures like Beowulf go online.
1999: Librarians become webmasters.
1998: The web becomes multilingual.
1999: The Open eBook format is a standard for eBooks.
1999: Authors go digital.
2000: yourDictionary.com is a language portal.
2000: The Bible of Gutenberg goes online.
2000: Distributed Proofreaders digitizes books from public domain.
2000: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) works on free online
journals.
2001: Wikipedia is the first main online cooperative encyclopedia.
2001: Creative Commons works on new ways to respect authors' rights on
the web.
2003: MIT offers its course materials for free in its OpenCourseWare.
2004: LibraryBlog Europe is launched as a multilingual project.
2004: Google launches Google Print to rename it Google Books.
2005: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) launches a world public digital
library.
2006: Microsoft launches Live Search Books as its own digital library.
2006: The union catalog WorldCat goes online for free.
2007: Citizendium is a main online "reliable" cooperative encyclopedia.
2007: The Encyclopedia of Life will document all species of animals and
plants.
[Unless specified otherwise, all quotations are excerpts from NEF
interviews. These interviews are available online at
.]
1968: ASCII
[Overview]
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code
for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for
information interchange in English. It was published in 1968 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and
1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set
of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z,
numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), i.e. the ones that are
available on the English/American keyboard. Plain Vanilla ASCII can be
read, written, copied and printed by any simple text editor or word
processor. It is the only format compatible with 99% of all hardware
and software. It can be used as it is or to create versions in many
other formats. Extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin)
are sets of 256 characters that include accented characters as found in
French, Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) for
French.
[In Depth (published in 2005)]
Whether digitized years ago or now, all LibraryBlog books are
created in 7-bit plain ASCII, called Plain Vanilla ASCII. When 8-bit
ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) is used for books with
accented characters like French or German, LibraryBlog also
produces a 7-bit ASCII version with the accents stripped. (This doesn't
apply for languages that are not "convertible" in ASCII, like Chinese,
encoded in Big-5.)
LibraryBlog sees Plain Vanilla ASCII as the best format by far.
It is "the lowest common denominator." It can be read, written, copied
and printed by any simple text editor or word processor on any
electronic device. It is the only format compatible with 99% of
hardware and software. It can be used as it is or to create versions in
many other formats. It will still be used while other formats will be
obsolete (or are already obsolete, like formats of a few short-lived
reading devices launched since 1999). It is the assurance collections
will never be obsolete, and will survive future technological changes.
The goal is to preserve the texts not only over decades but over
centuries. There is no other standard as widely used as ASCII right
now, even Unicode, a universal double-byte character encoding launched
in 1991 to support any language and any platform.
1971: LibraryBlog
[Overview]
In July 1971, Michael Hart created LibraryBlog with the goal of
making available for free, and electronically, literary works belonging
to public domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, LibraryBlog
was the first information provider on the internet and is the oldest
digital library. When the internet became popular in the mid-1990s, the
project got a boost and gained an international dimension. The number
of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 5,000 (in April
2002), 10,000 (in October 2003), 15,000 (in January 2005), 20,000 (in
December 2006) and 25,000 (in April 2008), with a current production
rate of around 340 new books each month. With 55 languages and 40
mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens
of thousands every day. LibraryBlog promotes digitization in
"text format", meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched,
analyzed and compared with other books. Contrary to other formats, the
files are accessible for low-bandwidth use. The main source of new
LibraryBlog eBooks is Distributed Proofreaders, conceived in
October 2000 by Charles Franks to help in the digitizing of books from
public domain.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
The electronic book (eBook) is now 37 years old, which is still a short
life comparing to the five and a half century print book. eBooks were
born with LibraryBlog, created by Michael Hart in July 1971 to
make available for free electronic versions of literary books belonging
to public domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, LibraryBlog
was the first information provider on an embryonic internet and is the
oldest digital library. Long considered by its critics as impossible on
a large scale, LibraryBlog had 25,000 books in April 2008, with
tens of thousands downloads daily. To this day, nobody has done a
better job of putting the world's literature at everyone's disposal,
while creating a vast network of volunteers all over the world, without
wasting people's skills or energy.
During the first twenty years, Michael Hart himself keyed in the first
hundred books, with the occasional help of others. When the internet
became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and gained an
international dimension. Michael still typed and scanned in books, but
now coordinated the work of dozens and then hundreds of volunteers
across many countries. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000
(in August 1997) to 2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and
4,000 (in October 2001).
37 years after its birth, LibraryBlog is running at full
capacity. It had 5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books in
October 2003, 15,000 books in January 2005, 20,000 books in December
2006 and 25,000 books in April 2008, with 340 new books available per
month, with 40 mirror sites worldwide, and with books downloaded by the
tens of thousands every day.
Whether they were digitized 30 years ago or digitized now, all the
books are captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII),
with the same formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any
machine, operating system or software, including on a PDA, a cellphone
or an eBook reader. Any individual or organization is free to convert
them to different formats, without any restriction except respect for
copyright laws in the country involved.
In January 2004, LibraryBlog had spread across the Atlantic with
the creation of LibraryBlog Europe. On top of its original
mission, it also became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a
number of national and linguistic sections. While adhering to the same
principle: books for all and for free, through electronic versions that
can be used and reproduced indefinitely. And, as a second step, the
digitization of images and sound, in the same spirit.
1974: INTERNET
[Overview]
When LibraryBlog began in July 1971, the internet was not even
born. On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United
States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the
mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case
yet. But to send a 5K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet
would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText
was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still
20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. The internet was born
in 1974 with the creation of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol /
Internet Protocol) by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in
1983. It got a boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and of the
first browser in 1993. At the end of 1997, there were 90 to 100 million
users, with one million new users every month. At the end of 2000,
there were over 300 million users.
1977: UNIMARC
[Overview]
In 1977, the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)
published the first edition of UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format, followed
by a second edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983. UNIMARC
(Universal Machine Readable Cataloging) is a common bibliographic
format for library catalogs, as a solution to the 20 existing national
MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) formats, which meant lack of
compatibility and extensive editing when bibliographical records were
exchanged. With UNIMARC, catalogers would be able to process records
created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC format would first be
converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted into another MARC format.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
At the time, the future of online catalogs was linked to the
harmonization of the MARC format. Set up in the early 1970s, MARC is an
acronym for Machine Readable Catalogue. This acronym is rather
misleading as MARC is neither a kind of catalog nor a method of
cataloguing. According to UNIMARC: An Introduction, a document of the
Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Core Programme,
MARC is "a short and convenient term for assigning labels to each part
of a catalogue record so that it can be handled by computers. While the
MARC format was primarily designed to serve the needs of libraries, the
concept has since been embraced by the wider information community as a
convenient way of storing and exchanging bibliographic data."
After MARC came MARC II. MARC II established rules to be followed
consistently over the years. The MARC communication format intended to
be "hospitable to all kinds of library materials; sufficiently flexible
for a variety of applications in addition to catalogue production; and
usable in a range of automated systems."
Over the years, however, despite cooperation efforts, several versions
of MARC emerged, e.g. UKMARC, INTERMARC and USMARC, whose paths
diverged because of different national cataloguing practices and
requirements. We had an extended family of more than 20 MARC formats.
Differences in data content meant some extensive editing was needed
before records could be exchanged.
One solution to incompatible data was to create an international MARC
format - called UNIMARC - which would accept records created in any
MARC format. Records in one MARC format would first be converted into
UNIMARC, and then be converted into another MARC format, so that each
national bibliographic agency would need to write only two
programs - one to convert into UNIMARC and one to convert from
UNIMARC - instead of having to write twenty programs for the conversion
of each MARC format (e.g. INTERMARC to UKMARC, USMARC to UKMARC etc.).
In 1977, the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions) published UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format, followed by a
second edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983. These
publications focused primarily on the cataloguing of monographs and
serials, while taking into account international efforts towards the
standardization of bibliographic information reflected in the ISBDs
(International Standard Bibliographic Descriptions).
In the mid-1980s, UNIMARC expanded to cover documents other than
monographs and serials. A new UNIMARC Manual was produced in 1987, with
an updated description of UNIMARC. By this time UNIMARC had been
adopted by several bibliographic agencies as their in-house format.
Developments didn't stop there. A standard for authorities files was
set up in 1991, as explained on the website of IFLA in 1998:
"Previously agencies had entered an author's name into the
bibliographic format as many times as there were documents associated
with him or her. With the new system they created a single
authoritative form of the name (with references) in the authorities
file; the record control number for this name was the only item
included in the bibliographic file. The user would still see the name
in the bibliographic record, however, as the computer could import it
from the authorities file at a convenient time. So in 1991
UNIMARC/Authorities was published."
In 1991 a Permanent UNIMARC Committee was also created to regularly
monitor the development of UNIMARC. Users realized that continuous
maintenance - and not just the occasional rewriting of manuals - was
needed, to make sure all changes were compatible with what already
existed.
On top of adopting UNIMARC as a common format, The British Library
(using UKMARC), the Library of Congress (using USMARC) and the National
Library of Canada (using CAN/MARC) worked on harmonizing their national
MARC formats. A three-year program to achieve a common MARC format was
agreed on by the three libraries in December 1995.
Other libraries began using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
as a common format for both the bibliographic records and the
hypertextual and multimedia documents linked to them. As most
publishers were using SGML for book records, librarians and publishers
began working on a convergence between MARC and SGML. The Library of
Congress worked on a DTD (Definition of Type of Document, which defines
its logical structure) for the USMARC format. A DTD for the UNIMARC
format was developed by the European Union. Some European libraries
chose SGML to encode their bibliographic data. In the Belgian Union
Catalog, for example, the use of SGML allowed to add descriptive
elements and to facilitate the production of an annual CD-ROM.
1984: COPYLEFT
[Overview]
The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, who was a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free,
and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be
free as well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the
software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to
further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has
freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the
program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so
would make copyleft impossible. The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a
reference to the verb 'to leave' — only to the direction which is the
inverse of 'right'. (...) The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a
form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other
document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and
redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or
non commercially." (excerpt from the GNU website)
1990: WEB
[Overview]
The internet got its first boost with the invention of the web and its
hyperlinks by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle
Physics) in 1990, and a second boost with the invention of the first
browser Mosaic in 1993. The internet could now be used by anyone, and
not only by computer literate people. There were 100 million internet
users in December 1997, with one million new users per month, and 300
million internet users in December 2000. In summer 2000, the number of
non-English-speaking users reached the number of English-speaking
users, with a percentage of 50-50. According to Netcraft, an internet
services company, the number of websites went from one million (April
1997) to 10 million (February 2000), 20 million (September 2000), 30
million (July 2001), 40 million (April 2003), 50 million (May 2004), 60
million (March 2005), 70 million (August 2005), 80 million (April
2006), 90 million (August 2006) and 100 million (November 2006).
[In Depth (published in 1999, updated in 2008)]
The World Wide Web -that became the Web or web- was invented by Tim
Berners-Lee in 1989-90. In 1998, he stated: "The dream behind the web
is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing
information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext
link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it
draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too,
dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic
mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work
and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us
analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit
in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from: The World Wide
Web: A very short personal history, May 1998.)
Christiane Jadelot, researcher at INaLF-Nancy (INaLF: National
Institute of the French Language) wrote: "I began to really use the
internet in 1994, with a browser called Mosaic. I found it a very
useful way of improving my knowledge of computers, linguistics,
literature... everything. I was finding the best and the worst, but as
a discerning user, I had to sort it all out and make choices. I
particularly liked the software for e-mail, file transfers and dial-up
connections. At that time I had problems with a programme called
Paradox and character sets that I couldn't use. I tried my luck and
threw out a question in a specialist news group. I got answers from all
over the world. Everyone seemed to want to solve my problem!" (July
1998)
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was founded in October 1994 to
develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines,
software and tools) for the web, as a forum for information, commerce,
communication and collective understanding. The W3C develops common
protocols to lead the evolution of the web, for example the
specifications of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and XML (eXtensible
Markup Language). HTML is used for publishing hypertext on the web. XML
was originally designed as a tool for large-scale electronic
publishing. It now plays an increasingly important role in the exchange
of a wide variety of data on the web and elsewhere.
According to the network tracking firm Netcraft, there were 100 million
websites on November 1st, 2006. Previous milestones in the survey were
reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million),
September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40
million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005
(70 million), April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).
1991: UNICODE
[Overview]
First published in January 1991, Unicode is the universal character
encoding maintained by the Unicode Consortium. "Unicode provides a
unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language." (excerpt from
the website) This double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a
basis for the processing, storage and interchange of text data in any
language, and any modern software and information technology protocols.
Unicode is a component of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
specifications.
1993: ONLINE BOOKS PAGE
[Overview]
Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at
Carnegie Mellon University, The Online Books Page is "a website that
facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet.
It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the
benefit and edification of all." (excerpt from the website) John
Ockerbloom first maintained this page on the website of the School of
Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999, he moved it to
its present location at the University of Pennsylvania Library, where
he is a digital library planner and researcher. The Online Books Page
listed 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000
books published by women), 25,000 books in 2006 and 30,000 books in
2007. The books "have been authored, placed online, and hosted by a
wide variety of individuals and groups throughout the world", with
7,000 books from LibraryBlog. The FAQ also lists copyright
information about most countries in the world with links to further
reading.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
John Mark Ockerbloom first started the website of the School of
Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU CS), and began
maintaining The Online Books Page on it. Web space and computing
resources were provided by the School of Computer Science.
Interviewed by email in September 1998, John wrote: "I was the original
webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993. The local
web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and
originally The Online Books Page was just one of these pages,
containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in
our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of some of
LibraryBlog's texts.)
After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I
noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap
and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to
have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to
download or view books from all over the net. So that's how my index
got started.
I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The Online
Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great
potential the net had for making literature available to a wide
audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I
have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books
to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some form or
another.
I 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."
In 1998, The Online Books Page listed more than 7,000 books, which
could be browsed by author, by title or by subject. It also listed
significant directories and archives of online texts, and special
exhibits. From the main search page, users could search four types of
media: books, music, art, and video.
The Online Books Page began listing serials. As stated on the website:
"Along with books, The Online Books Page is also now listing major
archives of serials (such as magazines, published journals, and
newspapers), as of June 1998. Serials can be at least as important as
books in library research. Serials are often the first places that new
research and scholarship appear. They are sources for firsthand
accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are also often the
first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature appears.
(For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a
'books page', back issues of serials are often bound and reissued as
hardbound 'books'.)"
The Online Books Page participated in the Experimental Search System of
the Library of Congress. It also worked with The Universal Library
Project, hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1999, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Ph.D. in computer
science, John moved to work as a digital library planner and researcher
at the University of Pennsylvania Library. He also moved The Online
Books Page there, and went on expanding it.
1993: PDF
[Overview]
PDF (Portable Document Format) was conceived by Adobe in 1992, launched
in June 1993 with Adobe Acrobat software, and perfected over 15 years
as the global standard for distribution and viewing of information. It
"lets you capture and view robust information from any application, on
any computer system and share it with anyone around the world.
Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and
rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and vision." (excerpt from
the website) Adobe Acrobat gives the tools to create and view PDF files
and is available in many languages and for many platforms (Macintosh,
Windows, Unix, etc.). Ten years later, over 500 million copies of
PDF-based Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader, until May 2003) have
been downloaded worldwide. Approximately 10% of the documents on the
internet are available in PDF.
1994: LIBRARY WEBSITES
[Overview]
The first library website was the one created by the Helsinki City
Library in Finland, which went live in February 1994. Traditional
libraries began using a website as a new virtual window for their
patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the
online catalog, or surf on a broad selection of websites on various
topics, depending on their needs. Libraries also began developing
digital libraries alongside their standard collections, for a large
audience to be able to access their specialized, old, local and
regional collections. Librarians could now fulfill two goals that used
to be in contradiction - book preservation (on shelves) and book
communication (on the internet).
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The first library website was the one created by the Helsinki City
Library in Finland, which went live in February 1994. Many libraries
began developing a digital library alongside their standard
collections. Digital libraries allowed a large audience to have access
to documents belonging to specialized, old, local or regional
collections. Thanks to their digital libraries, traditional libraries
could achieve a long-time dream and fulfill two goals which used to be
in contradiction - book preservation and book communication. On the one
hand, books were taken out of their shelves only once to be scanned. On
the other hand, books could easily be accessed anywhere at any time,
and read on the screen of a computer, without the need to go to the
library and struggle through a lengthy process to have access to the
original books, for various reasons: concern for preservation of rare
and fragile documents, reduced opening hours, forms to fill out, long
waiting period to get the document, and shortage of staff. All these
reasons were often hurdles to get over, and often required of the
researcher an unfailing patience and an out-of-the-ordinary
determination to finally get to the document.
Some virtual libraries were created from scratch, right on the internet
from the beginning, with no back up from a traditional library. This
was the case of Athena, founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss
teacher, and hosted on the website of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland. Athena was created as a multilingual digital library
focusing on philosophy, science, classics, literature, history, and
economics. As Geneva is in French-speaking Switzerland, it also focused
on putting French texts online. The Helvetia section gathered documents
about Switzerland. A specific page offered a number of links to other
digital libraries in the world.
In an interview dated February 1996, Pierre Perroud explained:
"Electronic texts represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial
participation to culture dissemination, (...) [and] a good complement
to the paper book, which remains irreplaceable for reading (...). [The
paper book] remains a mysteriously holy companion with profound
symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it against our
bodies, we look at it with admiration; its small size comforts us and
its content impresses us; its fragility contains a density we are
fascinated by; like man it fears water and fire, but it has the power
to shelter man's thoughts from time." (excerpt from the Swiss magazine
Informatique-Informations)
The Internet Public Library (IPL) opened in March 1995 as the first
digital public library of and for the internet community. Its different
sections were: Reference, Exhibits, Magazines and Serials, Newspapers,
Online Texts, and Web Searching. There were also sections for Teen and
Youth. All the items of the collections were carefully selected,
catalogued and described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library,
IPL also listed the most interesting projects run by librarians on the
internet, in the section Especially for Librarians.
1994: BOLD PUBLISHERS
[Overview]
Some publishers decided to use the web as a new marketing tool. In the
U.S., NAP (National Academy Press) was the first publisher in 1994 to
post the full text of some books, for free, with the authors' consent.
NAP was followed by MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) in 1995. Michael Hart, founder of LibraryBlog, wrote
in 1997: "As university publishers struggle to find the right business
model for offering scholarly documents online, some early innovators
are finding that making a monograph available electronically can boost
sales of hard copies." (excerpt from the LibraryBlog Newsletter
of October 1997)
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The web became a marketing tool for publishers. Some publishers decided
to put the full text of some books on the web, for free, with their
authors' consent. Oddly enough, there was no drop in sales - on the
contrary, sales increased. In the US, NAP was the first publisher to
take such a risk in 1994, followed by the MIT Press in 1995, and it
worked.
NAP (National Academy Press) was created by the National Academy of
Sciences to publish its own reports and the ones of the National
Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National
Research Council. In 1994, NAP was publishing 200 books a year in
science, engineering, and health. The new NAP Reading Room offered
1,000 entire books, available online for free in various formats
("image" format, HTML format and PDF format).
In 1995, the MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was
publishing 200 new books a year and 40 journals, first in science and
technology, and then in architecture, social theory, economics,
cognitive science, and computational science. The MIT Press decided to
put a number of books online for free, as "a long-term commitment to
the efficient and creative use of new technologies." Sales of the print
books increased.
Michael Hart, founder of LibraryBlog, wrote in 1997: "As
university publishers struggle to find the right business model for
offering scholarly documents online, some early innovators are finding
that making a monograph available electronically can boost sales of
hard copies. The National Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its
books online, and is finding that the electronic versions of some books
have boosted sales of the hard copy monographs - often by two to three
times the previous level. It's 'great advertising', says the Press's
director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar results: 'For each of
our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our sales. The plain
fact is that no one is going to sit there and read a whole book online.
And it costs money and time to download it'." (excerpt from the Project
Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997)
1995: AMAZON.COM
[Overview]
Amazon.com was a "pioneer" online bookstore that created an entirely
new economic model. Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos in July 1995,
in Seattle, on the west coast of the U.S., after a market study which
led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the
internet. When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a catalog of
3 million books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon.com didn't have
windows looking out on the street and books skillfully lined up on
shelves or piled upon displays. The virtual window is its website, with
all transactions made through the internet. Books are stored in huge
storage facilities before being put into boxes and sent by mail. In
November 2000, Amazon.com had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million
items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries in UK (in
August 1998), in Germany (in August 1998), in France (August 2000) and
in Japan (October 2000). A fifth subsidiary opened in Canada in June
2002. A sixth subsidiary - named Joyo - opened in China in September
2004.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in July 1995, after a market study which
led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the
internet.
In Spring 1994, he drew up a list of twenty products that could be sold
online, ranging from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched
the top five, which were CDs, videos, computer hardware, computer
software, and books.
"I used a whole bunch of criteria to evaluate the potential of each
product, but among the main criteria was the size of the relative
markets. Books, I found out, were an $82 billion market worldwide. The
price point was another major criterion: I wanted a low-priced product.
I reasoned that since this was the first purchase many people would
make online, it had to be non-threatening in size. A third criterion
was the range of choice: there were 3 million items in the book
category and only a tenth of that in CDs, for example. This was
important because the wider the choice, the more the organizing and
selection capabilities of the computer could be put in good use."
(excerpt from the Amazon.com press kit)
In 1998, Amazon.com was offering 3 million books, CDs, audio books,
DVDs, computer games - more than 14 times as many titles as the large
chain superstores - to 3 million people in 160 countries. "Businesses
can do things on the web that simply cannot be done any other way",
wrote Jeff Bezos. "We are changing the way people buy books and music."
Amazon.com quickly became the largest online bookstore, with a catalog
of these 3 million items that could be ordered online, authoritative
reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer reviews, and book
recommendations. As an internet retailer, Amazon.com could offer more
services than traditional retailers: lower prices, larger selection,
and a wealth of product information.
Any book lover could post his own reviews of books on Amazon's website,
and read others. He could read many interviews with authors, and a
number of blurbs and excerpts from books. He could search for books by
author, subject, title, ISBN or publication date. Prices were
discounted, with savings of 20-40% on 400,000 titles (40% on selected
feature books, 30% on hardcovers, and 20% on paperbacks). The client
usually received the books within a week. If he requested it, he could
receive an email announcing a new book by a favorite author or a new
book on a favorite topic. He could select some book categories (44
listed), to be sent a monthly review of new books by email. All things
that were entirely new at the time.
What we take for granted now, i.e. buy a book in Europe from the US
site of Amazon.com, or buy a book in the US from the German site of
Amazon.de, was making big waves at the time, first as "unfair
competition" with the local online bookstores, then for taxation. A
first outline agreement was concluded between the US and the European
Union in December 1997, and this agreement was followed by an
international convention. The internet was decided a free trade area,
i.e. without any custom taxes for software, films and electronic books
bought online. Material goods (books, CDs, DVDs, and so on) and
services were subject to existing regulations, with collection of the
VAT for example, but with no additional custom taxes.
Amazon.com and others had great assets, but there were bad news for
small bookstores. Like the small bookstore set up in 1971 by my friend
Catherine Domain in central Paris, on the island Ile Saint-Louis,
surrounded by the Seine river.
The small Ulysses Bookstore is known as the oldest travel bookstore in
the world. It has more than 20,000 books, maps and magazines, out of
print and new, in a number of languages, about any country and any kind
of travel, all packed up in a tiny space. Catherine has been a
traveller since she was a child. She travels every summer - usually
sailing - while her boyfriend runs the bookstore. She is also a member
of the French National Union of Antiquarian and Modern Bookstores
(SLAM), the Explorers' Club and the International Club of Long-Distance
Travellers.
Catherine visited 140 countries, where she sometimes had a hard time.
But one of her most difficult challenges was to set up a website on her
own, from scratch, without knowing anything about computers. Catherine
wrote in December 1999: "My site is still pretty basic and under
construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before
being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a
lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but that doesn't
worry me..." Nevertheless, despite the internet, she was pessimistic
about the future. "I am very pessimistic, because the internet is
killing off specialist bookstores."
1995: ONLINE PRESS
[Overview]
The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the
early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and
CompuServe. In 1995, newspapers and magazines began creating their own
websites to offer a partial or full version of their latest
issue - available freely or through subscription (free or paid) - with
online archives. In Europe, the Times and the Sunday Times set up a
common website called Times Online, with a way to create a personalized
edition. The weekly publication The Economist also went online in UK,
as well as the weekly Focus and the weekly Der Spiegel in Germany, the
daily Le Monde and daily Libération in France, and the daily El País in
Spain. The computer press went logically online as well, like the
monthly Wired, created in 1992 in California to cover cyberculture as
"the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", or
ZDNet, another leading computer magazine. More and more "only"
electronic magazines were also created.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The first electronic versions of newspapers were available in the early
1990s through commercial services like America Online or CompuServe.
Then, in 1995, newspapers and magazines began to create websites to
offer the full version of their latest issue - available freely or
through subscription (free or paid) - which was then archived online.
There were also heated debates on copyright issues for articles posted
on the web. More and more "only" electronic magazines were created.
In 1996, the New York Times site could be accessed free of charge. It
included the contents of the daily newspaper, breaking news updates
every ten minutes, and original reporting available only online. The
Washington Post site provided the daily news online, with a full
database of articles including images, sound and video.
In Europe, the Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website
called Times Online, with the possibility to create a personalized
edition. The respected Economist was also available online, as were the
French daily newspapers Le Monde and Libération, the Spanish daily
newspaper El País or the German weekly magazines Focus or Der Spiegel.
The computer press went online as well. First the monthly Wired,
created in 1992 in California to focus on cyberculture and be the
magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century. Then
ZDNet, a main publisher of computer magazines.
Behind the news, the web was providing a whole encyclopedia to help us
understand them. The web was providing instant access to a wealth of
information (geographical maps, biographical notes, official texts,
political and economic data, audiovisual and video data); speed in
information dissemination; access to main photographic archives; links
to articles, archives and data on the same topic; and a search engine
to browse articles by date, author, title, subject, etc.
From the start, there were also all these zines using the internet as a
cheap way to get published. John Labovitz launched The E-Zine-List in
Summer 1993 to list electronic zines (e-zines) around the world, the
ones that were accessible via the web, FTP, gopher, email, and other
services. The list was updated monthly.
What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on his website: "For
those of you not acquainted with the zine world, 'zine' is short for
either 'fanzine' or 'magazine', depending on your point of view. Zines
are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done
often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre,
and/or esoteric. Zines are not 'mainstream' publications - they
generally do not contain advertisements (except, sometimes,
advertisements for other zines), are not targeted towards a mass
audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit. An 'e-zine'
is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic
networks like the internet."
3,045 zines were listed on November 29, 1998. John wrote on his
website: "Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e-zines has
increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and Gopher woodworks
to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even asking
for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has
been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any
type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the
original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart,
or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'." John stopped updating
his list a few years later.
1996: INTERNET ARCHIVE
[Overview]
Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a
non-profit organization that built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format for
researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored
every two months or so. In October 2001, with 30 billion web pages
stored, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to
be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. In 2006,
there were 65 billion pages from 50 million websites. In late 1999, the
Internet Archive also started to include more collections of archived
web pages on specific topics. It also became an online digital library
of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2005, the
Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with other
contributors as a collective effort to build a permanent archive of
multilingual digitized text (Text Archive) and multimedia content.
1996: NEW WAYS OF TEACHING
[Overview]
With more and more computers available in schools and at home, and more
and more internet connections, teachers began exploring new ways of
teaching. Going from print book culture to digital culture was changing
their relationship to knowledge, and the way both scholars and students
were seeing teaching and learning. Print book culture provided stable
information whereas digital culture provided "moving" information.
During the September 1996 meeting of IFIP (International Federation of
Information Processing), Dale Spender gave a lecture about Creativity
and the Computer Education Industry, with insightful comments on
forthcoming trends.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
Going from print book culture to digital culture began changing our
relationship to knowledge. Book culture provided stable information
whereas digital culture provided "moving" information. During the
September 1996 meeting of the IFIP (International Federation of
Information Processing), Dale Spender gave an interesting lecture about
Creativity and the Computer Education Industry.
Here are some excerpts:
"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in
books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information. For the
information in books stays the same - it endures.
And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a
body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorized,
and tested of course.
The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth
too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no
doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major
contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the
scientific revolution. (...)
But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the
oldest information - the longest lasting information that is the most
reliable and useful. It is the very latest information that we now put
the most faith in - and which we will pay the most for. (...)
Education will be about participating in the production of the latest
information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout
life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all
have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be
members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of
knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information
professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play
with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant
changes that are occurring."
1996: PALM PILOT
[Overview]
In the 1990s, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist and writer living in
Silicon Valley and specializing in IT (information technology). He was
also working as a "facilitator" between the United States and Europe.
Jacques was among the first to buy a Palm Pilot in March 1996, and
wrote about it in his free online newsletter. As a side remark, he
remembered in July 1999: "In 1996 I published a few issues of a free
English newsletter on the internet. It had about 10 readers per issue
until the day (in January 1996) when the electronic version of Wired
Magazine created a link to it. In one week I got about 100 emails, some
from French readers of my book La vallée du risque - Silicon Valley
[editor's note: The Valley of Risk - Silicon Valley, published by Plon,
Paris, in 1990], who were happy to find me again." He added: "All my
clients now are internet companies. All my working tools (my mobile
phone, my PDA and my PC) are or will soon be linked to the internet."
Despite fierce competition, Palm stayed the leader in the PDA market,
with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002.
1997: DIGITAL PUBLISHING
[Overview]
Digital publishing became mainstream in 1997. This was a new step in
the changes underwent by the traditional publishing chain since the
1970s. The traditional printing business was first disrupted by new
photocomposition machines, with lower costs. Text and image processing
began to be handed over to desktop publishing shops and graphic art
studios. Impression costs went on decreasing with desktop publishing,
photocopiers, color photocopiers and digital printing equipment.
Digitization also accelerated the publication process. Editors,
designers and other contributors could all work at the same time on the
same book. For educational, academic and scientific publications,
online publishing became a cheaper solution than print books, with the
possibility of regular updates to include the latest information.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
Since the 1970s, the traditional publishing chain has drastically
changed. The printing work done by pre-press shops was first disrupted
by new photocomposition machines. Text and image processing began to be
handed over to advertising and graphic art agencies. Impression costs
went on decreasing with desktop publishing, copiers, color copiers and
digital printing equipment.
In 1997, text and image processing was provided at a low price by
desktop publishing shops and graphic art studios. Digitization
accelerated the publication process. Editors, designers and other
contributors could all work at the same time on the same book.
Digitization also made possible the online publishing of educational
and scientific publications, which appeared as a far better solution
than print books, because they could be regularly updated with the
latest information. Some universities began distributing their own
textbooks online, with chapters selected in an extensive database, and
articles and commentaries from professors. For a seminar, a small print
could be made upon request with a selection of online articles sent to
a printer.
Electronic publishing allowed some academic publishers to keep running
their business, with lower costs and quick access. This way, small
publishers went on publishing specialized books, for which the printing
in a small number of copies had become more and more difficult over the
years due to budgetary reasons. These books could now be regularly
updated and their readers benefit from the latest version. Readers
didn't need to wait any more for a new printed edition, often postponed
if not cancelled because of commercial constraints.
Electronic publishing and traditional publishing became complementary.
The frontier between the two supports - electronic and paper - was
vanishing. Most recent print media already stemmed from an electronic
version anyway, on a word processor, a spreadsheet or a database. More
and more documents became only electronic. And more and more print
books were scanned to be included in digital bookstores and libraries.
At the end of the 1990s, there were no reliable statistics yet proving
that the large-scale use of computers and electronic documents would
make us paperless and save some tress, as hoped by all of us who
believe in nature preservation. We were still in a transition period.
Many people still needed a print version for easier reading, or to keep
track of a document in case the electronic file was accidentally
deleted, or to have some paper support for their documentation or
archives.
1997: LOGOS DICTIONARY
[Overview]
Logos is a leading translation company located in Modena, Italy. In
1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators in Modena and 2,500 free-lance
translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day. The
company made a bold move at the time, and decided to put on the web all
the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet
community to freely use them as well. The linguistic tools were the
Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in
Fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 300
billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals and
other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500
glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in
17 languages.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The Logos Dictionary is a multilingual dictionary with 7,580,560 words
(as of December 10, 1998). The Logos Wordtheque is a word-by-word
multilingual library with a massive database of 325,916,827 words
extracted from multilingual novels, technical literature and translated
texts. Logos Linguistic Resources is a database of 553 glossaries. The
Logos Universal Conjugator is a database for the conjugation of verbs
in 17 languages.
Logos is an international translation company based in Modena, Italy.
In 1997, Logos decided to put all the linguistic tools used by its
translators on the web for free. Logos had 200 translators on the spot
and 2,500 free-lance translators all over the world, who processed
around 200 texts per day.
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 online
dictionaries. A system cornerstone is the document 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
button to access the whole text or even to order the book, thanks to a
partnership agreement with Amazon.com, the famous online bookstore.
Foreign translations are also available. However, if no text containing
the required word is found, the system acts as a search engine, sending
the user to other websites mentioning the term in question. In the case
of certain words, you can even hear the pronunciation. If there is no
translation currently available, the system calls on the public to
contribute. Everyone can make their own suggestions, after which Logos
translators and the company check the forwarded translations."
1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE
[Overview]
As more and more people were using digital technology, previously
distinct information-based industries, such as printing and publishing,
graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging
into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was
named "multimedia convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a
serious enough issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor
Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia
Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva,
Switzerland. This international symposium was a tripartite meeting with
employers, unionists, and government representatives. Some
participants, mostly employers, demonstrated the information society
was generating or would generate jobs, whereas other participants,
mostly unionists, demonstrated there was a rise in unemployment
worldwide.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January
1997 at the headquarters of ILO (International Labor Office) in Geneva,
Switzerland.
Peter Leisink, associate professor of labor studies at the Utrecht
University, Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom
book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been
externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority
of them had entered self-employment, not as a first-choice option, but
as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These
people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than
as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on
only one publishing house for their work."
This international symposium was held as a tripartite meeting with
employers, unionists and government representatives. Some participants
still thought our information society would generate jobs, whereas it
was already stated worldwide that multimedia convergence was leading to
a massive loss of jobs.
Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book,
Paper and Communication Industry, stated that the French graphics
industry had lost 20,000 jobs - falling from 110,000 to 90,000 - within
the last decade, and that expensive social plans had been necessary to
re-employ those people. He explained: "If the technological
developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it
might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about
what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather
than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies
should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the
technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the
printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information.
Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership
concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the
print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat
to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press
today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the
press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal
issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and
consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual
negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these
matters."
Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' interventions, here was
the answer of Walter Durling, director of AT&T Global Information
Solutions: "Technology would not change the core of human relations.
More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for
negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the
relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue
to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it
could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When television
was developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but it
had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future
should not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity
was needed to generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to
be reinforced with the new technology in order to create jobs for those
who had been displaced. Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled
when they arose." In short, humanity shouldn't fear technology.
In fact, employees were not so much afraid of the future as they were
afraid of losing their jobs. In 1997, our society already had a high
unemployment rate, which was not the case when film was invented and
television developed. During the next years, what would be the balance
between job creation and lay-off? Unions were struggling worldwide to
promote the creation of jobs through investment, innovation, vocational
training, computer literacy, retraining for new jobs, fair conditions
for contracts and collective agreements, defense of copyright,
protection of workers in the artistic field, and defense of teleworkers
as workers having full rights. The European Commission was expecting 10
million European teleworkers in the year 2000, which would represent
20% of teleworkers worldwide.
Despite unions' efforts, would the situation become as tragic as what
we read in the report of the symposium? "Some fear a future in which
individuals will be forced to struggle for survival in an electronic
jungle. And the survival mechanisms which have been developed in recent
decades, such as relatively stable employment relations, collective
agreements, employee representation, employer-provided job training,
and jointly funded social security schemes, may be sorely tested in a
world where work crosses borders at the speed of light."
1998: ONLINE BEOWULF
[Overview]
Libraries began putting (digital versions of) their treasures on the
web for the world to enjoy. The British Library was a pioneer in this
field. Several treasures were online in 1998, including Beowulf, known
as the first great English masterpiece. Beowulf is the earliest known
narrative poem in English, and one of the most famous works of
Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript
of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the
manuscript - some historians believe it might have been written circa
750. Scholarly discussions on the date of creation and provenance of
the poem continue around the world, and researchers regularly require
access to the manuscript. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for
study not only raised conservation issues, it also made it unavailable
for the many visitors who were coming to the Library expecting to see
this literary treasure on display. The digitization of the manuscript
offered a solution to these problems, while providing new opportunities
for researchers and book lovers worldwide.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
Libraries began using the web to make their treasures freely available
to the world.
Here is the story of Beowulf.
Beowulf is a treasure of the British Library. "It is an Old English
heroic epic poem of anonymous authorship. This work of Anglo-Saxon
literature dates to between the 8th and the 11th century, the only
surviving European manuscript dating to the early 11th century. At
3,183 lines, it is notable for its length." (excerpt from Wikipedia)
The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731. 18th-century
transcripts mention hundreds of words and letters which were then
visible along the charred edges, and subsequently crumbled away over
the years. To halt this process, each leaf was mounted on a paper frame
in 1845.
Scholarly discussions on the date of creation and provenance of the
poem continue around the world, and researchers regularly require
access to the manuscript. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for
study not only raised conservation issues, it also made it unavailable
for the many visitors who were coming to the Library expecting to see
this literary treasure on display. Digitization of the manuscript
offered a solution to these problems, as well as providing new
opportunities for readers, and for the world to enjoy.
The Electronic Beowulf Project was launched as a huge database of
digital images of the Beowulf manuscript and related manuscripts and
printed texts. In 1998, the database included fiber-optic readings of
hidden letters and ultraviolet readings of erased text in the
manuscript; full electronic facsimiles of the 18th-century transcripts
of the manuscript; and selections from important 19th-century
collations, editions and translations. Major additions were planned,
such as images of contemporary manuscripts, and links with the Toronto
Dictionary of Old English Project and with the comprehensive
Anglo-Saxon bibliographies of the Old English Newsletter.
The project was developed in partnership with two leading experts,
Kevin Kiernan, from the University of Kentucky and Paul Szarmach, from
the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. Professor Kiernan
edited the electronic archive and produced a CD-ROM containing a number
of electronic images.
Brian Lang, chief executive of the British Library, explained in 1998:
"The Beowulf manuscript is a unique treasure and imposes on the Library
a responsibility to scholars throughout the world. Digital photography
offered for the first time the possibility of recording text concealed
by early repairs, and a less expensive and safer way of recording
readings under special light conditions. It also offers the prospect of
using image enhancement technology to settle doubtful readings in the
text. Network technology has facilitated direct collaboration with
American scholars and makes it possible for scholars around the world
to share in these discoveries. Curatorial and computing staff learned a
great deal which will inform any future programmes of digitization and
network service provision the Library may undertake, and our publishing
department is considering the publication of an electronic scholarly
edition of Beowulf. This work has not only advanced scholarship; it has
also captured the imagination of a wider public, engaging people
(through press reports and the availability over computer networks of
selected images and text) in the appreciation of one of the primary
artifacts of our shared cultural heritage." (excerpt from the 1998
website)
The British Library was a pioneer in Europe. Other treasures of the
library were already online: Magna Carta, the first English
constitutional text, signed in 1215, with the Great Seal of King John;
the Lindisfarne Gospels, dated 698; the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, which
could be the world's earliest print book; the Sforza Hours, dated
1490-1520, an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the Codex Arundel, a
notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), and the Tyndale New
Testament, the first English version of the New Testament, printed by
Peter Schoeffer, in Worms.
Brian King also stated the importance of the paper world, and the
ongoing commitment of the British Library to its paper collections. He
added: "The importance of digital materials will, however, increase. We
recognize that network infrastructure is at present most strongly
developed in the higher education sector, but there are signs that
similar facilities will also be available elsewhere, particularly in
the industrial and commercial sector, and for public libraries. Our
vision of network access encompasses all these. (...) 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." (excerpt from the
website)
Other national libraries started digitizing their collections to offer
a free digital library.
When interviewed by Jérôme Strazzulla in the daily newspaper Le Figaro
of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of the French National
Library, 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." The digital library Gallica went online
in 1997 with thousands of texts and images relating to French history,
life and culture. A major collection of 19th-century French texts and
images was available one year later.
1998: DIGITAL LIBRARIANS
[Overview]
The job of librarians, that had already changed a lot with computers,
went on to change even more with the internet. Computers made catalogs
much easier to handle. Instead of all these cards to be patiently
classified into wood or metal drawers, librarians could type in
bibliographic records in a program that was sorting out books by
alphabetical, chronological and systematic order. Librarians also began
using computer programs to lend books and buy new ones. By networking
computers, the internet gave a boost to union catalogs for a state, a
country or a region, and furthered interlibrary loan. Electronic mail
became commonplace for internal and external communications. Librarians
could subscribe to newsletters and participate in newsgroups and
discussion forums. A number of librarians became webmasters to run
library websites, online catalogs and digital libraries.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
I interviewed Peter Raggett, a digital librarian at OECD (Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development), and Bruno Didier, a digital
librarian at Institute Pasteur. Here are some excerpts.
= At the OECD Library
What is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich,
in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and
services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is
limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a
pluralistic democracy. The core of original members has expanded from
Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And
there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through
programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin
America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to membership."
(excerpt from the 1998 website)
The Center for Documentation and Information (CDI) of OECD provides
information to OECD agents in support of their research work. In 1998,
there were 60,000 monographs and 2,500 periodicals. The CDI also
provides information in electronic format from databases, CD-ROMs and
the internet.
Peter Raggett, head of CDI, has been a professional librarian for
nearly twenty years, first working in UK government libraries and then
at the OECD since 1994. He has used the internet since 1996. He built
up the CDI Intranet pages, which became a main tool for the staff.
Peter wrote in June 1998: "At the OECD Library we have collected
together several hundred World Wide Web sites and have put links to
them on the OECD Intranet. They are sorted by subject and each site has
a short annotation giving some information about it. The researcher can
then see if it is possible that the site contains the desired
information. This is adding value to the site references and in this
way the Central Library has built up a virtual reference desk on the
OECD network. As well as the annotated links, this virtual reference
desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and websites
relevant to several projects currently being researched at the OECD,
network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new acquisitions. The
Library catalogue will soon be available for searching on the Intranet.
The reference staff at the OECD Library uses the Internet for a good
deal of their work. Often an academic working paper will be on the web
and will be available for full-text downloading. We are currently
investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our
periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the internet."
Peter added: "The internet has provided researchers with a vast
database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are
seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one
tries to find information on a topic by searching the internet. When
one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like
Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find
valuable sites on a given topic. These search mechanisms work well if
one is searching for something very precise, such as information on a
person who has an unusual name, but they produce a confusing number of
references if one is searching for a topic which can be quite broad.
Try and search the web for Russia AND transport to find statistics on
the use of trains, planes and buses in Russia. The first references you
will find are freight-forwarding firms who have business connections
with Russia."
What about the future? "The internet is impinging on many peoples'
lives, and information managers are the best people to help researchers
around the labyrinth. The internet is just in its infancy and we are
all going to be witnesses to its growth and refinement. (...)
Information managers have a large role to play in searching and
arranging the information on the internet. I expect that there will be
an expansion in internet use for education and research. This means
that libraries will have to create virtual libraries where students can
follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the
world. Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a virtual
librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will
contact me by e-mail, telephone or fax, and I will do the research and
send them the results electronically."
= At the Institute Pasteur Library
In 1999, Bruno Didier was the webmaster of the Institute Pasteur
Library. "The Pasteur Institutes are exceptional observatories for
studying infectious and parasite-borne diseases. They are wedded to the
solving of practical public health problems, and hence carry out
research programmes which are highly original because of the
complementary nature of the investigations carried out: clinical
research, epidemiological surveys and basic research work. Just a few
examples from the long list of major topics of the Institutes are:
malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, yellow fever, dengue and poliomyelitis."
(excerpt from the 1999 website)
In August 1999, Bruno wrote about his work as a webmaster: "The main
aim of the Pasteur Institute Library website is to serve the Institute
itself and its associated bodies. It supports applications that have
become essential in such a big organization: bibliographic databases,
cataloguing, ordering of documents and of course access to online
periodicals (presently more than 100). It is also a window for our
different departments, at the Institute but also elsewhere in France
and abroad. It plays a big part in documentation exchanges with the
institutes in the worldwide Pasteur network. I am trying to make it an
interlink adapted to our needs for exploration and use of the internet.
The website has existed in its present form since 1996 and its audience
is steadily increasing. I build and maintain the web pages and monitor
them regularly. I am also responsible for training users, which you can
see from my pages. The web is an excellent place for training and is
included in most ongoing discussions about training."
What about the future of librarians? "Our relationship with both the
information and the users is what changes. We are increasingly becoming
mediators, and perhaps to a lesser extent 'curators'. My present
activity is typical of this new situation: I am working to provide
quick access to information and to create effective means of
communication, but I also train people to use these new tools. I think
the future of our job is tied to cooperation and use of common
resources. It is certainly an old project, but it is really the first
time we have had the means to set it up."
1998: MULTILINGUAL WEB
[Overview]
In 1998, Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing for
Globalink, a company specializing in language translation software and
services. Randy wrote in September 1998: "85% of the content of the web
in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by
more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by
increasing localization of company and organization sites, and
increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to
translate websites. (...) Because the internet has no national
boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria
driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have
virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'...
all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given
language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation
includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of
Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking
Morocco."
[In Depth (published in 2000, updated in 2004)]
In 1998, other languages than English began spreading on the web. In
fact, main non-English languages were present nearly from the start.
But most of the web was in English. Then people from all over the world
began having access to the internet, and posting pages in their own
languages. The percentage of the English language began to slowly
decrease from nearly 100% to 90%.
In 1998, Randy Hobler was an internet marketing consultant for
Globalink, a company specialized in language translation software and
services. Previously, Randy worked as a consultant for IBM, Johnson &
Johnson, Burroughs Wellcome, Pepsi, Heublein, and others.
Randy wrote in September 1998: "Because the internet has no national
boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria
driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have
virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'...
all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given
language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation
includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of
Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking
Morocco."
In 1999, Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of Chroniques de Cybérie,
a weekly report of internet news. Jean-Pierre wrote in August 1999:
"The web is going to grow in these non English-speaking regions. So we
have to take into account the technical aspects of the medium if we
want to reach these 'new' users. I think it is a pity there are so few
translations of important documents and essays published on the
web -- from English into other languages and vice-versa. (...) The
recent introduction of the internet in regions where it is spreading
raises questions which would be good to read about. When will
Spanish-speaking communications theorists and those speaking other
languages be translated?"
In 1999, Marcel Grangier was the head of the French Section of the
Swiss Federal Government's Central Linguistic Services, which meant he
was in charge of organizing translation matters for the Swiss
government. Marcel wrote in January 1999: "We can see multilingualism
on the internet as a happy and irreversible inevitability. So we have
to laugh at the doomsayers who only complain about the supremacy of
English. Such supremacy is not wrong in itself, because it is mainly
based on statistics (more PCs per inhabitant, more people speaking
English, etc.). The answer is not to 'fight' English, much less whine
about it, but to build more sites in other languages. As a translation
service, we also recommend that websites be multilingual. The
increasing number of languages on the internet is inevitable and can
only boost multicultural exchanges. For this to happen in the best
possible circumstances, we still need to develop tools to improve
compatibility. Fully coping with accents and other characters is only
one example of what can be done."
In 1998, Henri Slettenhaar was a professor at Webster University,
Geneva, Swizerland. He insisted regularly on the need of bilingual
websites, in the original language and in English. He wrote in December
1998: "I see multilingualism as a very important issue. Local
communities that are on the web should principally use the local
language for their information. If they want to present it to the world
community as well, it should be in English too. I see a real need for
bilingual websites. I am delighted there are so many offerings in the
original language now. I much prefer to read the original with
difficulty than getting a bad translation."
He added in August 1999: "There are two main categories in my opinion.
The first one is the global outreach for business and information. Here
the language is definitely English first, with local versions where
appropriate. The second one is local information of all kinds in the
most remote places. If the information is meant for people of an ethnic
and/or language group, it should be in that language first with perhaps
a summary in English. We have seen lately how important these local
websites are -- in Kosovo and Turkey, to mention just the most recent
ones. People were able to get information about their relatives through
these sites."
He added in August 2000: "Multilingualism has expanded greatly. Many
e-commerce websites are multilingual now and there are companies that
sell products which make localization possible (adaptation of websites
to national markets)."
Non English-speaking users reached 50% in Summer 2000. According to the
company Global Reach, they were 52.5% in Summer 2001, 57% in December
2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (including 34.9%
non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians) and 64.2% in March
2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians).
1999: OPEN EBOOK FORMAT
[Overview]
In 1999, there were nearly as many eBook formats as eBooks, with every
company and organization creating its own format for its own eBook
reader and its own electronic device. The publishing industry felt the
need to work on a common format for eBooks and and published in
September 1999 the first version of the Open eBook (OeB) format, an
eBook format based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and defined by
the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS). The Open eBook Forum was
created in January 2000 to develop the OeB format and OeBPS
specifications. Since 2000, most eBook formats were derived from - or
are compatible with the OeB format. In April 2005, the Open eBook Forum
became the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and the OeB
format became the ePub format. The ePub format is one of the standards
for the digital publishing industry.
1999: DIGITAL AUTHORS
[Overview]
Like many artists, Jean-Paul began exploring the internet and searching
what hyperlinks could offer to expand his writing towards new
directions. He switched from being a print author to being an
hypermedia author, and created Cotres furtifs (Furtive Cutters), a
website telling stories in 3D. He also enjoyed the freedom given by
online self-publishing, and wrote in August 1999: "The internet allows
me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers
and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize what I have
in my head: the print medium (desktop publishing, in fact) only allows
me to partly do that." He added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like
radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I click
on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click
to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the written media,
of course. But the difference is striking. So the internet didn't
change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't write the same
way for a website as you do for a script or a play."
[In Depth (published in 2000)]
I interviewed Murray Suid, a writer of educational books, who was
living in Palo Alto, California. Back in Paris, I interviewed
Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, who wrote some interesting comments
about digital literature.
= Educational Books
In 1998, Murray Suid was living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon
Valley. He was writing educational books, books for kids, multimedia
scripts and screenplays. He was among the first to choose a solution
that many authors would soon adopt. He explained in September 1998: "If
a book can be web-extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an
author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author
would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next
edition ever came out. (...) I do not know if I will publish books on
the web -- as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will
happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop
multimedia learning materials, and it is a form of teaching that I like
a lot -- blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and -- when
possible -- interactivity)."
Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we
are now web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products -- to update and
enrich them." A few months later, he added: "Our company -- EDVantage
Software -- has become an internet company instead of a multimedia
(CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students
and teachers."
= Hypermedia Writing
In 1999, Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, was the webmaster of
cotres.net, a site telling stories in 3D. He really enjoyed the freedom
given by online publishing. He wrote in August 1999: "The internet
allows me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies,
publishers and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize
what I have in my head: the print medium (desktop-publishing, in fact)
only allows me to partly do that. Then the intermediaries will take
over and I will have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is
greener..."
Jean-Paul added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all
directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links
on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as
the links appear). You can do this in the print media, of course. But
the difference is striking. So the internet didn't change my life, but
it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website
as you do for a script or a play.
But it wasn't exactly the internet that changed my writing, it was the
first model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself
Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during my month of
learning about buttons and links and about surfing by association,
objects and images. Being able, by just clicking on part of the screen,
to open piles of cards, with each card offering new buttons and each
button opening onto a new series of them. In short, learning everything
about the web that today seems really routine was a revelation for me.
I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock when they
discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the labs of Rank Xerox.
Since then I have been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper
print-out only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give
somebody who doesn't like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It
is only an approximation, because print forces us into a linear
relationship: the words scroll out page by page most of the time. But
when you have links, you have a different relationship to time and
space in your imagination. And for me, it is a great opportunity to use
this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a book gives
only a suggestion of it -- a vague one because a book is not meant for
that."
2000: YOURDICTIONARY.COM
[Overview]
After founding A Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD) in 1995, Robert Beard
included it in a larger project, yourDictionary.com, that he cofounded
in early 2000. He wrote in January 2000: "The new website is an index
of 1,200+ dictionaries in more than 200 languages. Besides the WOD, the
new website includes a word-of-the-day-feature, word games, a language
chat room, the old Web of On-line Grammars (now expanded to include
additional language resources), the Web of Linguistic Fun, multilingual
dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other
vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers, and other features;
dictionary indices. yourDictionary.com will hopefully be the premiere
language portal and the largest language resource site on the web. It
is now actively acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages
with a particular focus on endangered languages. It is overseen by a
blue ribbon panel of linguistic experts from all over the world."
[In Depth (published in 2001)]
After creating A Web of Online Dictionaries in 1995, Robert Beard
cofounded yourDictionary.com in early 2000. He wrote in January 2000:
"A Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD) is now a part of yourDictionary.com
(as of February 15, 2000). The new website is an index of 1,200+
dictionaries in more than 200 languages. Besides the WOD, the new
website includes a word-of-the-day-feature, word games, a language chat
room, the old Web of On-line Grammars (now expanded to include
additional language resources), the Web of Linguistic Fun, multilingual
dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other
vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers, and other features;
dictionary indices. YourDictionary.com will hopefully be the premiere
language portal and the largest language resource site on the web. It
is now actively acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages
with a particular focus on endangered languages. It is overseen by a
blue ribbon panel of linguistic experts from all over the world."
Answering my question about multilingualism, Robert Beard added in
January 2000: "While English still dominates the web, the growth of
monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various
solutions to the font problems. Languages that are endangered are
primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the
world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do not see the
web contributing to the loss of language identity and still suspect it
may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more
Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to
write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For
these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
Answering the same question, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle wrote in May 2001: "I
would emphasize the point that as regards the future of endangered
languages, the internet speeds everything up. If people don't care
about preserving languages, the internet and accompanying globalization
will greatly speed their demise. If people do care about preserving
them, the internet will be a tremendous help."
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle teaches computing - through the Gaelic
language - at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the Island of
Skye, in Scotland. He also maintains the college website, which is the
main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic. He also
maintains European Minority Languages, a list of minority languages by
alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote in May 2001: "There
has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at the
Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff,
flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic
spell-checking, Gaelic online terminology database. More hits on our
web site. More use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now
available continuously worldwide via the internet. Major project has
been translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first
software of any size available in Gaelic."
Published by SIL International (SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics),
The Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a catalogue of more than
6,700 languages. A paper version and a CD-ROM are also available.
Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions, 1971-2000.
She wrote in January 2000: "It is a catalog of the languages of the
world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the
number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names,
names of dialects, other sociolinguistic and demographic information,
dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and
language maps."
2000: ONLINE BIBLE OF GUTENBERG
[Overview]
The Bible of Gutenberg went online in November 2000, on the website of
the British Library. As we all know, the Bible of Gutenberg is
considered as the first print book. Gutenberg printed it in 1455 in
Germany, perhaps printing 180 copies, with 48 copies that would still
exist in 2000. Three copies - two full ones and one partial
one - belong to the British Library. The two full copies - a little
different from each other - were digitized in March 2000 by experts
from the Keio University of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone Communications).
2000: DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADERS
[Overview]
Conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks, Distributed Proofreaders
was launched online in March 2001 to help in the digitization of public
domain books. The method is to break up the tedious work of checking
eBooks for errors into small, manageable chunks. Originally meant to
assist LibraryBlog in the handling of shared proofreading,
Distributed Proofreaders has become the main source of Project
Gutenberg eBooks. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official
LibraryBlog site. The number of books processed through
Distributed Proofreaders has grown fast. In 2003, about 250-300 people
were working each day all over the world producing a daily total of
2,500-3,000 pages, the equivalent of two pages a minute. In 2004, the
average was 300-400 proofreaders participating each day and finishing
4,000-7,000 pages per day, the equivalent of four pages a minute.
Distributed Proofreaders processed a total of 3,000 books in February
2004, 5,000 books in October 2004, 7,000 books in May 2005, 8,000 books
in February 2006 and 10,000 books in March 2007, with the help of
36,000 volunteers.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
The main "leap forward" of LibraryBlog since 2000 is due to
Distributed Proofreaders. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an
official LibraryBlog site. In May 2006, Distributed Proofreaders
became a separate entity and continues to maintain a strong
relationship with LibraryBlog.
Volunteers don't have a quota to fill, but it is recommended they do a
page a day if possible. It doesn't seem much, but with hundreds of
volunteers it really adds up. In December 2007, five books were
produced per day by thousands of volunteers.
From the website one can access a program that allows several
proofreaders to be working on the same book at the same time, each
proofreading different pages. This significantly speeds up the
proofreading process. Volunteers register and receive detailed
instructions. For example, words in bold, italic or underlined, or
footnotes are always treated the same way for any book. A discussion
forum allows them to ask questions or seek help at any time. A project
manager oversees the progress of a particular book through its
different steps on the website.
The website gives a full list of the books that are: (a) completed,
i.e. processed through the site and posted to LibraryBlog; (b) in
progress, i.e. processed through the site but not yet posted, because
currently going through their final proofreading and assembly; (c)
being proofread, i.e. currently being processed. On August 3, 2005,
7,639 books were completed, 1,250 books were in progress and 831 books
were being proofread. On May 1st, 2008, 13,039 books were completed,
1,840 books were in progress and 1,000 books were being proofread.
Each time a volunteer (proofreader) goes to the website, s/he chooses a
book, any book. Then one page of the book appears in two forms side by
side: the scanned image of one page and the text from that image (as
produced by OCR software). The proofreader can easily compare both
versions, note the differences and fix them. OCR is usually 99%
accurate, which makes for about 10 corrections a page. The proofreader
saves each page as it is completed and can then either stop work or do
another. The books are proofread twice, and the second time only by
experienced proofreaders. All the pages of the book are then formatted,
combined and assembled by post-processors to make an eBook. The eBook
is now ready to be posted with an index entry (title, subtitle, author,
eBook number and character set) for the database. Indexers go on with
the cataloging process (author's dates of birth and death, Library of
Congress classification, etc.) after the release.
Volunteers can also work independently, after contacting Project
Gutenberg directly, by keying in a book they particularly like using
any text editor or word processor. They can also scan it and convert it
into text using OCR software, and then make corrections by comparing it
with the original. In each case, someone else will proofread it. They
can use ASCII and any other format. Everybody is welcome, whatever the
method and whatever the format.
New volunteers are most welcome too at Distributed Proofreaders (DP),
Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) and Distributed
Proofreaders Canada (DPC). Any volunteer anywhere is welcome, for any
language. There is a lot to do. As stated on both websites, "Remember
that there is no commitment expected on this site. Proofread as often
or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We
encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We
hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary
history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'."
2000: PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE
[Overview]
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by
biomedical scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen,
from Stanford University, Palo Alto, and University of California,
Berkeley. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit
organization whose mission is to make the world’s scientific and
medical literature a public resource. In early 2003, PLoS created a
non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide
scientists and physicians with high-quality, high-profile journals in
which to publish their most important work: PLoS Biology (launched in
2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational
Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006),
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007). All PLoS articles are freely
available online, and deposited in the free public archive PubMed
Central. They can be freely redistributed and reused, including for
translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also
hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or
to convert their existing journals to an open access model.
2001: WIKIPEDIA
[Overview]
Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry
resigned later on), Wikipedia has quickly grown into the largest
reference website on the internet. Its multilingual content is free and
written collaboratively by people worldwide. Its website is a wiki,
which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information
throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their
authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free
Documentation License). Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia
Foundation, which runs a number of other projects, for example
Wiktionary - launched in December 2002 - followed by Wikibooks,
Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikiquote. In December 2004, Wikipedia had
1.3 million articles from 13,000 contributors in 100 languages. Two
years later, in December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250
languages.
2001: CREATIVE COMMONS
[Overview]
Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a
professor at Stanford Law School, California. As stated on its website,
"Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it
easier for people to share and build upon the work of others,
consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and
other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator
wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any
combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed
works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed
works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed
works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008. Science Commons
was founded in 2005 to "design strategies and tools for faster, more
efficient web-enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007
as "a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full
potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational
resources."
2002: MIT OPENCOURSEWARE
[Overview]
The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic
publishing initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) to promote open dissemination of knowledge and information.
A pilot version of the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) was available
online in September 2002, with 32 course materials of MIT. In September
2003, the site was officially launched with several hundred course
materials. In March 2004, 500 course materials were available in 33
different topics. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by
34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007,
all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated
courses per year. In November 2005, the MIT launched the OpenCourseWare
Consortium (OCW Consortium) as a collaboration of educational
institutions creating a broad body of open educational content using a
share model. One year later, the OCW Consortium included the courses of
100 universities worldwide.
2004: LibraryBlog EUROPE
[Overview]
In January 2004, LibraryBlog spread across the Atlantic with the
launching of LibraryBlog Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed
Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental
cultural and educational project located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe
uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe
is a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several
European languages by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe
was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60 languages and
60 linguistic teams representing all European languages. DP Europe
supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages.
Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every
character in any language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book
in May 2005 and its 500th book in October 2008. DP Europe operates
under "life +50" copyright laws. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe
will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital
libraries.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
In 2004, multilingualism became one of the priorities of Project
Gutenberg, like internationalization. Michael Hart went off to Europe,
with stops in Paris, Brussels and Belgrade. In Belgrade, he met with
the team of Project Rastko, to support the creation of Distributed
Proofreaders Europe (launched in December 2003) and LibraryBlog
Europe (launched in January 2004).
The launching of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project
Rastko was indeed a very important step. DP Europe uses the software of
the original Distributed Proofreaders and is dedicated to the
proofreading of books for LibraryBlog Europe. Since the very
beginning, DP Europe has been a multilingual website, with its main
pages translated into several European languages by volunteer
translators. DP Europe was available in 12 languages in April 2004 and
22 languages in May 2008.
The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing
all the European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will
provide books for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries.
The goal is for every country to have its own digital library
(according to the country copyright limitations), within a continental
network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for
the whole planet).
A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and
exciting project for Europe, and catalyzed volunteers' energy in both
Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no
boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register). Founded in
1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational
project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture.
It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional
cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe.
In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its
100th book. In June 2005 LibraryBlog Europe was launched with
these first 100 books. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to
proofread books in numerous languages. Created in 1991 and widely used
since 1998, Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number
for every character in any language, contrary to the much older ASCII
that was meant only for English and a few European languages.
On August 3, 2005, 137 books were completed (processed through the site
and posted to LibraryBlog Europe), 418 books were in progress
(processed through the site but not yet posted, because currently going
through their final proofreading and assembly), and 125 books were
being proofread (currently being processed). On May 10, 2008, 496 books
were completed, 653 books were in progress and 91 books were being
proofread.
2004: GOOGLE BOOKS
[Overview]
In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a
project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able to see
excerpts from their books and order them online. In December 2004,
Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended
for libraries, to build up a world digital library by digitizing the
collections of main partner libraries. The beta version of Google Print
went live in May 2005. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until
further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of authors and
publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August
2006 under the new name of Google Books. Google Books has offered books
digitized in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan,
Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid
and New York Public Library), with either the full text for public
domain books or excerpts for copyrighted books. The lawsuit with
associations of authors and publishers was settled in October 2008.
[In Depth (published in 2008)]
In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a
project aimed at publishers, for users to be able to see snippets of
their books and order them online. The beta version of Google Print
went on line in May 2005. In December 2004, Google launched the second
part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a
digital library of 15 million books by scanning and digitizing the
collections of main libraries, beginning with the Universities of
Michigan (7 million books), Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, and the New
York Public Library. The planned cost was an average of US $10 per
book, and $150 to $200 million on ten years. In August 2005, Google
Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by
publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August
2006 under the new name of Google Books.
Google Books was launched in August 2006 to replace the controversial
Google Print, stopped in August 2005 because of main copyright
concerns. Google Books offers excerpts of books digitized by Google in
the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford,
California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New
York Public Library). Google scans 3,000 books a day, including
copyrighted books. The inclusion of copyrighted books is widely
criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the US, lawsuits
were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American
Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is
that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes
copyright laws, even if only snippets are made freely available on the
search engine. To counteract copyright concerns and the problems of a
closed platform, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and
make them searchable and downloadable through any search engine.
2005: OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE
[Overview]
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive
in early 2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It
was launched in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non
profit and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent
archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The
project aims at digitizing public domain books around the world and
make them searchable through any web search engine and downloadable for
free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and digitizes only
public domain books, except when the copyright holder has expressly
given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of
California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the
National Archives in the United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and Prelinger
Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text
Archive of the Internet Archive. In December 2006, they reached a
milestone of 100,000 digitalized books publicly available, with 12,000
new books added per month. Two years later, in December 2008, one
million books were "posted under OCA principles or otherwise public
domain hosted by the Internet Archive."
2006: MICROSOFT LIVE SEARCH BOOKS
[Overview]
Microsoft has also participated in the Open Content Alliance (OCA),
launched by the Internet Archive in October 2005. In December 2006,
Microsoft released the beta version of Live Search Books. The book
search engine performs keyword searches for non copyrighted books
digitized by Microsoft from the collections of the British Library,
University of California, and University of Toronto, followed in
January 2007 by the New York Public Library and Cornell University.
Books offer full text views and can be downloaded in PDF files. In the
future, Microsoft intends to add copyrighted works with the permission
of their publishers. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements with
several main publishers, including Cambridge University Press and
McGraw Hill. After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million
journal articles, Microsoft ended the Live Search Books program in May
2008 and closed the website.
2006: FREE WORLDCAT
[Overview]
WorldCat was created in 1971 by the non-profit OCLC (Online Computer
Library Center) as the union catalog of the university libraries in the
State of Ohio. Over the years, OCLC became a national and worldwide
library cooperative, and WorldCat the largest library catalog in the
world. In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400
languages from 9,000 member libraries (paid subscription) in 112
countries. In 2006, 73 million bibliographic records were linking to 1
billion documents available in these libraries. In August 2006,
WorldCat began to migrate to the web through the beta version of the
new website WorldCat.org. Member libraries now provide free access to
their catalogs and electronic resources: books, audio books, abstracts
and full-text articles, photos, music CDs and videos. Another pioneer
site was RedLightGreen, launched in Spring 2004 (with a beta version in
Fall 2003) as the web version of the RLG Union Catalog, another major
union catalog created in 1980 by the Research Libraries Group (RLG).
RedLightGreen ended its service in November 2006, after a successful
3-year run, and RLG joined OCLC.
[In Depth (published in 1999)]
In 1998, two organizations - OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and
RLIN (Research Library Information Network) - were running
international bibliographical databases through the internet.
The OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a non-profit, membership,
library computer service and research organization dedicated to
furthering access to the world's information and reducing information
costs. More than 27,000 libraries in 65 countries were using OCLC
services to manage their collections and to provide online reference
services. The website was available in English, Chinese, French,
German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
OCLC services included: access services; collections and technical
services; reference services; resource sharing; Dewey Decimal
Classification (published by OCLC Forest Press); and preservation
resources. From its headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC operated one of
the world's largest library information networks. Libraries in the US
joined OCLC through their OCLC-affiliated regional networks. Libraries
outside the US received OCLC services through OCLC Asia Pacific, OCLC
Canada, OCLC Europe, OCLC Latin America and the Caribbean, or via
international distributors.
OCLC was also running WorldCat - the name of the OCLC Online Union
Catalog - which is a merged electronic catalog of library catalogs
around the world, and the world's largest bibliographic database with
its 38 million records (in early 1998) in 400 languages (with
transliteration for non-Roman languages), and an annual increase of 2
million records.
WorldCat stemmed from a concept which is the same for all union
catalogs: earn time to avoid the cataloguing of the same document by
many catalogers worldwide. When they are about to catalog a
publication, the catalogers of the member libraries search the OCLC
catalog. If they find the record, they copy it in their own catalog and
add some local information. If they don't find the record, they create
it in the OCLC catalog, and this new record is immediately available to
all the catalogers of the member libraries worldwide.
Unlike RLIN, another main union catalog that accepts several records
for the same document (please see below), the OCLC Online Union Catalog
accepts only one record per document, and asks its members not to
create duplicate records for documents that were already cataloged. The
records are created in USMARC format (MARC: Machine Readable Catalog)
according to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd version (AACR2).
What is the history of OCLC? "In 1967, the presidents of the colleges
and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library
Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries
of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs.
OCLC's first offices were in the Main Library on the campus of the Ohio
State University (OSU), and its first computer room was housed in the
OSU Research Center. It was from these academic roots that Frederick G.
Kilgour, OCLC's first president, oversaw the growth of OCLC from a
regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international
network. In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the
governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become
members and participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the
Ohio College Library Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name
of the corporation became OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Today, OCLC serves more than 27,000 libraries of all types in the US
and 64 other countries and territories." (excerpt from the 1998
website)
In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records - with one record per
document. RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) had 88 million
records - with several records per document.
RLIN was run by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The central RLIN
database was a union catalog of 88 million items held in main libraries
belonging to RLG member institutions, including research and
specialized libraries, like law, technical, and corporate libraries.
RLIN included:
(1) records that described works cataloged by the Library of Congress,
the National Library of Medicine, the US Government Printing Office,
CONSER (Conversion of Serials Project), the British Library, the
British National Bibliography, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript
Collections, and RLG members and users;
(2) nearly all the books cataloged since 1968 and rapidly expanding
coverage for older materials;
(3) information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores,
films, videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections
and machine-readable data files;
(4) unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United
Nations' DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index
to pre-1950 commercial sound recordings;
(5) international book vendors' in-process records, that were
transferred to bibliographers, acquisition services and catalogers, to
order records or help them for cataloguing items in their own local
databases.
RLIN also provided:
(1) A catalog of computer files. Machine-readable data files were
useful to a growing number of disciplines. RLIN contained records
describing a number of such files, from the full-text French literary
works in the ARTFL Database to the statistical data collected by the
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
at the University of Michigan;
(2) A catalog of archives and special collections. The archival and
manuscript collections of research libraries, museums, state archives,
and historical societies contained essential primary resources, but
information about their contents was often elusive. Archivists and
curators worked with RLG to create an automated format for these
collections. In 1998, there were 500,000 records available in RLIN for
archival collections located throughout North America. These records
described many collections by personal name, organization, subject, and
format.
RLIN also hosted the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), an
invaluable research tool for scholars in English culture, language, and
literature. This file provided extensive descriptions and holdings
information for letterpress materials printed in UK or any of its
dependencies in any language, from the beginnings of print to 1800 - as
well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world.
Produced by the ESTC editorial offices at the University of California,
Riverside, and the British Library, in partnership with the American
Antiquarian Society and over 1,600 libraries worldwide, the file was
updated and expanded daily. ESTC served as a comprehensive bibliography
of the hand-press era and as a census of surviving copies. ESTC
included 420,000 records as of June 1998, from the beginnings of print
(1473) through the 18th century - including materials ranging from
Shakespeare and Greek New Testaments to anonymous ballads, broadsides,
songs, advertisements and other ephemera.
2007: CITIZENDIUM
[Overview]
Citizendium was launched in October 2006 as a pilot project to build a
new encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who was the
cofounder of Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales) in January 2001, but resigned
later on over policy and content quality issues. Citizendium - which
stands for a "citizen's compendium of everything" - is a wiki project
open to public collaboration, but combining "public participation with
gentle expert guidance." The project is experts-led, not experts-only.
Contributors use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms, and they
are guided by expert editors. "Editors will be able to make content
decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working
shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors." (Larry Sanger, Toward a
New Compendium of Knowledge, September 2006) Constables make sure the
rules are respected. Citizendium was launched on March 25, 2007, with
1,100 articles, 820 authors and 180 editors.
2007: ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
[Overview]
Launched in May 2007, the Encyclopedia of Life is a global scientific
effort to document all known species of animals and plants (1.8
million), and expedite the millions of species yet to be discovered and
catalogued (8 to 10 million). This collaborative effort is led by
several main institutions: Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard
University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The
initial funding comes from the MacArthur Foundation (US $10 million)
and the Sloan Foundation ($2.5 million). A number of pages will be
available by mid-2008. The encyclopedia will be operational in 3-5
years and completed (with all known species) in 10 years. Built on the
scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the
Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely
available to all users everywhere.
WEBSITES
1968: ASCII: http://www.asciitable.com/
1974: Internet: http://www.isoc.org/
1977: UNIMARC: http://www.unimarc.net/
1984: Copyleft: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
1990: Web: http://www.w3.org/
1991: Unicode: http://unicode.org/
1993: Online Books Page: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
1993: PDF: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html
1994: Library Websites: http://lists.webjunction.org/libweb/
1994: Bold Publishers: http://www.nap.edu/
1995: Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/
1995: Online Press: http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
1996: Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/
1996: New Ways of Teaching: http://www.ifip.org/
1996: Palm Pilot: http://www.palm.com/
1997: Digital Publishing:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/
1997: Logos Dictionary: http://www.logos.it/
1997: Multimedia Convergence:
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/
1998: Online Beowulf:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/beowulf/
1998: Digital Librarians: http://www.ifla.org/
1998: Multilingual Web: http://www.w3.org/International/
1999: Digital Authors: http://www.cotres.net/
1999: Open eBook: http://www.idpf.org/
1999: yourDictionary.com: http://www.yourdictionary.com/
2000: Online Bible of Gutenberg:
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.html
2000: Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net/
2000: Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org/
2001: Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/
2001: Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/
2002: MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/
2004: LibraryBlog Europe: http://pge.rastko.net/
2004: Google Print / Book Search: http://books.google.com/
2005: Open Content Alliance: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
2006: Microsoft Live Search Books: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/
2006: Free WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/
2007: Citizendium: http://en.citizendium.org/
2007: Encyclopedia of Life: http://www.eol.org/
Copyright © 2008 Marie Lebert
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