digital_library - Michel Roland on Diigo

02 Apr 08

Without leaving Manhattan, Kazin read his way into “lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial ‘academies’ where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore.”
It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press
The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.
13 more annotations...
- s early as the third millennium B.C., Mesopotamian scribes began to catalogue the clay tablets in their collections. For ease of reference, they appended content descriptions to the edges of tablets, and they adopted systematic shelving for quick identification of related texts.
- Six hundred years later, Eusebius, a historian and bishop of the coastal city of Caesarea, in Palestine, assembled Christian writings in the local library. He also devised a system of cross-references, known as “canon tables,” that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels—a system that the scholar James O’Donnell recently described as the world’s first set of hot links.
- With electronic publishing programs, libraries have begun to take on many of the tasks that traditionally fell to university presses, such as the distribution of doctoral dissertations and the reproduction of local book and document collections—a spread of activities that Eusebius would have found natural.
- Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.
- the film- and reprint-based libraries never became really comprehensive. The commercial companies that did most of the filming naturally concentrated on more marketable texts, while nonprofit sponsors concentrated on the texts that mattered to them. No over-all logic determined which texts were reprinted on paper, which were filmed, and which remained in obscurity.
- It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,”
- The cataloguing data that identify an item are often incomplete or confusing. And the key terms that Google provides in order to characterize individual books are sometimes unintentionally comic. It’s not all that helpful, when you’re thinking about how to use an 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris, to be told that one of its keywords is “fauteuils.”
- If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million
- The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.
- Specialist engines like Google Scholar can discriminate with astonishing precision between relevant and irrelevant, firsthand and derivative information.
- And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks.
- these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.
- For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

07 Jan 08

Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces

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digital_library internet_archive zotero

a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive.

28 Nov 07

ULIB

www.ulib.org/ULIBAboutUs.htm - Preview

digital_library

The first major project of Universal Library is the Million
Book Digital Library project. Typical large high-school libraries
house fewer than 30,000 volumes. Most libraries in the world
have less than a million volumes. The total number of different
titles indexed in OCLC's WorldCat is about 48 million. One million
books, therefore, is more than the holdings of most high-schools,
and is equivalent to the libraries at many universities and
represents a useful fraction of all available books.

Digital Assets Repository (DAR)

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digital_library digital_repository

The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is a system developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina,
the Library of Alexandria, to create and maintain the digital library collections.
DAR acts as a repository for all types of digital material preserving and archiving
digital media, and providing public access to digitized collections through web-based
search and browsing facilities. The goal of this project is building a digital resources
repository by supporting the creation, use, and preservation of varieties of digital
resources as well as the development of management tools. These tools help the library
to preserve, manage and share digital assets. The system is based on evolving standards
for easy integration with web-based interoperable digital libraries.

25 Nov 07

Portail européen Michael : Découvrez le patrimoine culturel numérique européen

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digital_collection digital_library europe michael portal

Grâce au service multilingue MICHAEL vous avez la possibilité d'explorer les collections numériques des musées, services d'archives, bibliothèques et autres institutions culturelles d'Italie, de France et du Royaume-Uni. Que vous soyez amateur d'art, d'archéologie, de généalogie, ou bien intéressé par l'histoire romaine ou moderne ou encore par des projets de vacances, MICHAEL peut vous aider à trouver les ressources accessibles.

Patrimoine numérique. Catalogue des collections numérisées

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bibliothèque_numérique culture digital_collection digital_library france

Le catalogue en ligne du patrimoine culturel numérisé décrit les collections numérisées et les productions
multimédia associées (site internet, dévédérom, cédérom...). Il recense les institutions à l'origine de projets
de numérisation en France. Vous êtes intéressé par le Moyen Age ou le XXe siècle, un état civil pour construire
votre arbre généalogique ou le patrimoine de votre région, le catalogue peut vous aider à chercher,
vous indiquer où trouver.

Le catalogue est le volet national du projet européen Michael.

Cefael :: Accueil

cefael.efa.gr/site.php - Preview

ancient_history bibliothèque_numérique digital_library histoire history

Cefael est une bibliothèque numérique regroupant l'intégralité des ouvrages publiés par l'École française d'Athènes depuis 1877.

Digithèque de l'ULB : Digithèque

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bibliothèque_numérique digital_library

Le but de la Digithèque est de numériser des ouvrages des bibliothèques de l’ULB, pour la plupart libres de droit, dégradés, encore très consultés et/ou ayant une grande valeur intellectuelle, et qui ne sont plus édités ; les copies numériques de ces oeuvres sont progressivement mises, gratuitement, à disposition des utilisateurs via le catalogue de l’ULB et le site de la digithèque, et ce dès le 16 novembre 2005.

Gallica, bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

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bibliothèque_numérique bnf digital_library

Gallica 2 est la nouvelle version de la bibliothèque numérique de la BNF.

Projet évolutif, le site Gallica 2 sera amené à s'enrichir au cours des mois.

Des bibliothèques rejettent les propositions de mise en ligne de leurs livres - Tour de Toile du BBF

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bibliothèque_numérique contrat digital_library google google_books microsoft

La principale objection à un contrat avec Google ou Microsoft est la clause qui l’accompagne, stipulant que les bibliothèques ne peuvent autoriser les autres moteurs de recherche à référencer les ouvrages numérisés par ces entreprises. La crainte est forte également qu’une entreprise quelconque en vienne à dominer le marché de la numérisation des œuvres, et puisse exploiter cette position dominante à des fins lucratives.

Europeana

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bibliothèque_numérique bnf digital_library

Europeana est un prototype de bibliothèque en ligne développé par la Bibliothèque nationale de France, dans le cadre du projet de Bibliothèque numérique européenne.

Gallica, bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

gallica.bnf.fr - Preview

bibliothèque_numérique bnf digital_library

24 Nov 07

Bibliothèque nationale de France : le nouveau Gallica est arrivé ... - P E C I A : Le manuscrit médiéval ~ The medieval manuscript

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bnf digital_library

Gallica 2 est la nouvelle version de la bibliothèque
numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Le projet Gallica 2 doit faire évoluer la bibliothèque numérique vers le
web.2.0. La consultation des documents en mode image se fait au format PNG, la
consultation en mode texte en HTML, et le téléchargement et l’impression au
format PDF (image et texte). Les documents sont décrits selon le format de
métadonnées Dublin Core simple.

20 Nov 07

Perseus Digital Library

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digital_library perseus

Install Perseus 4.0 on your computer:
All of the source code for the Perseus Java Hopper and much of the content in Perseus is now
available under an open source license. You can download the code, compile it, and run it on your
own system. This requires more labor and a certain level of expertise for which we can only
provide minimal support. However, since it will be running on your own machine, it can be much
faster than our website, especially during peak usage times.

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Patrimoine numérique. Catalogue des collections numérisées

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Gallica, bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

Des bibliothèques rejettent les propositions de mise en ligne de leurs livres - Tour de Toile du BBF

Europeana

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Bibliothèque nationale de France : le nouveau Gallica est arrivé ... - P E C I A : Le manuscrit médiéval ~ The medieval manuscript

Perseus Digital Library

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