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Digitising the past
Large-scale projects to 'digitise the
past' and thereby ensure future generations have networked access to
print publications, photographs, sound recordings, cinefilms and other
material have proved contentious.
Digitisation means users view a
'digital surrogate' (preserving often fragile originals), access is not
tied to physical proximity (ie ease of convenience and savings in staff
costs) and physical storage requirements are reduced, although costs
savings are not as great as anticipated and there's been considerable
criticism of institutions - such as the British Library - that digitised
and then destroyed major parts of their collection.
The Preserving
Digital Information report of
the CPA & RLG suggests that digitisation by individual
institutions is often not cost effective; however resource sharing (ie
collaborative digitisation and access to shared material through an
intranet or a global digital library) is attractive.
benchmarks
In the US the American Memory (AM)
project, aimed at providing digital access to millions of items held by
the Library of Congress and other institutions has, for political as well as technological reasons,
concentrated on the digitisation of images - including maps, paintings,
photographs - and some manuscripts of literary or historic significance.
Locally the National Archives of Australia (NAA)
has digitised key federation documents and commenced the daunting task
of providing digital colour facsimiles of the millions of documents in
its custody, while the National Library's PictureAustralia (PA)
is a gateway for images from the State Library of Victoria, University
of Queensland Library, Australian War Memorial and other institutions.
The University of California's
Alexandria Digital Library
project (Pharos) aims to
create a digital
library encompassing maps and pictorial material for use by
institutions across the US.
Yale University's Project Open Book
(POB)
is exploring the conversion of microfilm, hitherto the medium of
choice among the archival mafia, to digital imagery.
The Mellon
Foundation, noted earlier in this guide, has funded the large-scale Journal
Storage (JSTOR) Project,
with universities coming together to provide ongoing electronic access in a secure environment to
over 100 law, science and humanities journals. Imaging of that print
material is now close to the target of 750,000 journal pages.
As part of the Making of America Project a consortium of US universities
such as Cornell and the Uni of Michigan are placing the text of several
thousand magazines
and books online.
private projects
Most media attention has focussed on
two private initiatives - Bartleby and Gutenberg - although they're
dwarfed by major academic digitisation projects.
Project Bartleby (Bartleby)
is began with online publication of Whitman's Leaves
of Grass and now features a full-text searchable database containing
over 200,000 web pages, including over 22,000 quotations and 4,765
poems. Most of the content is out of copyright: Bartleby's essentially
capturing old publications.
Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg)
also draws on public domain works. Presentation's in ASCII rather than
HTML or PDF and material is added to the database by volunteers so the
coverage is eclectic rather than comprehensive. Gutenberg has around
3,000 titles. It's unrelated to the academic Gutenberg-E project
described in Analysphere of 1 July.
The more ambitious Universal Library
Project (UL)
aims to "start a worldwide movement to make available ALL the
Authored Works of Mankind on the Internet so that anyone can access
these works from any place at any time". Uh huh. Searching and viewing
would be free; individuals and existing libraries would be able to
purchase digital copies.
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