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DIGITAL LIBRARIES ON THE
WEB
A Selective List with Links
The following libraries have been chosen because of the scope of their collections and the variety of materials they have included. The American Memory project at the Library of Congress, for example, is one of a kind in that it provides free, open access to thousands of artifacts of American history, including actual motion pictures. Projekt Runeberg is notable not only for its inclusion and access to full texts of Scandinavian literature, but because of its images of original manuscripts. One of the more notable accomplishments of digitizing libraries is the Internet Public Library's virtual reference desk. Not only can users freely access digital information through IPL's resources, they can also digitally query a reference librarian. These are by no means the only admirable projects on the Web, but they are some of the more notable.
| ALEX Catalogue of Electronic Texts | Created as a "labor of love" by Eric Lease Morgan, ALEX provides access to the full text of works of American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy. Users can search not only for documents by title and author, but can search within the documents for keywords and concepts. ALEX's tools also allow users to search the document collection offline and to create PDF versions of the electronic texts. | |
| American Memory | A project of the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program, American Memory provides users with primary source materials on United States history and culture, including photos, documents, motion pictures, maps, and sound recordings. The project's ultimate goal is to "digitize millions of the Library's unique American history collections and make them freely available to teachers, students, and the general public over the Internet." | |
| Internet Public Library | A true digital library in many senses, the IPL has an electronic reference desk, exhibits, magazines and serials, newspapers, books, and conveniently organized links to other Web resources. Begun in a graduate seminar at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies in 1995, the IPL provides access to digital resources freely available over the Internet and even fields questions received electronically. | |
| National Library of Canada Project | The NLC is in the process of digitizing materials that support the study of Canada and Canadians. Current available resources include The Art of Illustration (Canadian children's books illustrations), the Canadian Federation, Cultivating Canadian Gardens, Directory of Special Collections in Canadian Libraries, the Glenn Gould Archive, Out of This World (Canadian science fiction and fantasy), and Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings. | |
| Perseus Project | Although the Perseus project was begun in 1985, the Web accessible digital library did not start taking shape until spring 1995. Sponsored by the Classics Department of Tufts University, Perseus provides users a wealth of resources for studying ancient civilizations, including full texts and translations, maps, art catalogs, and secondary sources analyzing ancient civilization. | |
| Project Gutenberg | Begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg provides plain ASCII text versions of works which have entered the public domain. Their goal is to reach a collection strength of 10,000 electronic texts by the year 2001. A part of the Gutenberg philosophy is to offer texts that are most likely to appeal to or be useful to the majority of readers: "we choose etexts we hope extremely large portions of the audience will want and use frequently." Further information about Gutenberg's origins and philosophy is available from their Web site in the document "What Is Project Gutenberg." | |
| Projekt Runeberg | Begun in December 1992, Projekt Runeberg has published over 200 free electronic editions of Nordic literature. Etexts in Runeberg are contributed by volunteers under the coordination of editors at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden. | |
| Thomas | "Acting under the directive of the leadership of the 104th Congress to make Federal legislative information freely available to the Internet public, a Library of Congress team brought the THOMAS World Wide Web system online in January 1995, at the inception of the 104th Congress." The site currently has bill summaries from 1973 to 1976, the full text of bills vrom 1989 to date, the full text of the Congressional Record from 1989 to date, committee information, information about the legislative process, and a selection of historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence. The site is keyword searchable and contains a wealth of information. | |
| University of Virginia Library. Electronic Text Center | The Electronic Text Center has been building its collection of etexts since 1992 and currently has a collection strength of 40,000 humanities texts either available online or offline. Materials not available over the Internet are accessible at the Center on CD-ROM. Online texts are SGML encoded and are often accompanied by images. The Center also provides expertise in establishing electronic collections to other organizations and individuals. Even though some texts are restricted to University of Virginia users only, the Center offers open Internet access to many of its etexts. |
| Additional links to digital libraries can be found in IFLA's resource list. |
Comments & Suggestions
to Jim Alderman.
Updated 8 December 1998.