Comments

Site updated
April 2003
Projects Focusing on the Creation of and Access to Digital Collections
     
Alex Catalog of Electronic Texts   "The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy." 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.
     
Alexandria Project   Located at the Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Alexandria is the cooperative effort of researchers and educators from both the public and private sectors to make geographical information available over the Internet. "The centerpiece of the Alexandria Project is the Alexandria Digital Library," an electronic resource providing materials from the Map and Imagery Laboratory in the Davidson Library and other geographic materials. Goals of Alexandria are to research means for distributing multimedia electronically, develop technology to support electronic distribution, and to field test the technology and implement a digital library.
     
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."
     
Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE   "The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide. We are sponsored by The Library, U.C. Berkeley and Sun Microsystems, Inc."
     
BUBL "BUBL is a national information service for the higher education community, run by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde." The name is an acronym formed from BUlletin Board for Libraries, the original name for the project. All information available through BUBL is served free to the Internet community. BUBL's collection of Internet resources currently includes subject access to more than 12,000 Web sites.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities   Princeton and Rutgers Universities established the Center in 1991 to "satisfy the needs of research and teaching in the humanities." Many texts are available online at no charge. Other texts are restricted to certain users or are available through subscription. Projects currently sponsored by the Center include the Humanities and Social Sciences Data Center, the Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank, the Freud Textbase, the SGML Conversion of the Oral History Archives of World War II, HOW(ever), the Griffis Collection, Project Theophrastus, and the Humanist Subscription Database.
     
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval   The CIIR partners with both government and industry to develop software that will support information exchange and retrieval and is concerned with all aspects of information retrieval from protocols to user interfaces to multimedia retrieval. The Center's "core" concerns include retrieval techniques, indexing, learning, interfaces, distributed scalable IR, multilingual and cross-linqual IR, information resource integration, categorization, multimedia indexing and retrieval, automated knowledge acquisition, information extraction, sophisticated access, and case-based reasoning. The Center has partnered with such organizations as America Online, Data General Corporation, the Defense Technical Information Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation, and numerous government departments including the IRS, the Department of Defense, and the Library of Congress.
     
Center for Research on Information Access   The CRIA has worked toward coordinating digital technology projects at Columbia University since 1995. A joint effort of the University Libraries and the Computer Science Department, the Center's current projects include the Spoken Yiddish Project, several National Science Foundation projects covering rights management, document summaries, automatic topic identification, and computational tractability, and research into OCR for scanned legal documents. The Center's homepage also provides links to several digital library projects underway at Columbia.
     
Center for the Study of Digital Libraries   The CSDL was established in 1995 to "foster pioneering research on the theory and application of digital libraries and to create flexible and efficient new technologies for their use." The Center focuses on facilitating two broad areas of research: digital library projects and computing infrastructure projects. Notable digital library projects currently being developed include the George Bush Digital Library, the Cervantes Project, and the TAMU Herbarium Project. The Center is also cooperating with the Flora of Texas Consortium, the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and the US Department of Agriculture in developing digital collections in support of their many projects and has numerous computing infrastructure projects in the works, including Walden's Paths, a K-12 education project intended to help educators organize the Web for their students.
     
Digital Library Federation   The DLF was founded in 1995 as a cooperative project aimed at exploring the establishment of an "open digital library." A number of major research institutions were instrumental in founding the project, including the Library of Congress, Yale University, Harvard University, Penn State, Princeton, and Columbia University. The Federation's charter outlines its goals.
     
IFLA  

"IFLA (The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. It is the global voice of the library and information profession."

Especially impressive is IFLA's information on Digital Libraries: Resources and Projects, which provides information on digital libraries, on digital library initiatives, and links to major digital collection projects in the Americas and Europe.
     
Informedia   Through funding from the NSF, DARPA, and NASA, Carnegie Mellon University is establishing a multimedia library on the Web that will ultimately contain digital video, audio, images, and text. A major thrust of the project is to automatically index soundtracks and provide access to them through a full-text retrieval system. The text database then provides access to "video paragraphs" within the digitized video collections. Intellectual property laws prevent open access to the collections, but pay-per-view access is planned to offer VHS quality video to K-12 and post-secondary institutions.
     
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   "The National Library's collections focus primarily on Canadiana, works in all subjects written by, about or of interest to Canadians, published in Canada or abroad." The library currently includes the Canadian Literature Research Service, Canadian children's literature, literary manuscripts, an electronic collection of Canadian books and periodicals, the Jacob M. Lowy Collection of rare Hebraica and Judaica, microform collections, music, printed music, music archives, recorded sound and video, the Preservation Collection of Canadiana, and other materials that provide information on Canada and Canadians.
     
NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative Projects   The National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have jointly funded research into digitizing information and making it accessible to users. The Initiative currently funds projects at University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and University of California Santa Barbara.
     
Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance   PRDLA is a consortium of thirteen academic libraries that are working toward building an online resource that will facilitate resource sharing among the constituent libraries. The resulting Pacific Rim Digital Library will feature an "information desk, guides to information resources, exhibits, and digitized books, journals, maps, and manuscripts. The first major project of the PRDLA will be the Pacific Explorations Archive, a digital collection of resources from member libraries that cover the history of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. The Archive will include maps, drawings, pictures, diaries, and manuscripts and will be available freely over the Internet. Additional projects in the planning include a Multilingual Gateway, a Chines Serials Database, and resources for personnel exchange and document delivery.
     
PALMM   "Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the state universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials. PALMM projects may involve a single institution or may be collaborative efforts between multiple institutions or a combination of university and non-university institutions. PALMM projects create high-quality virtual collections relevant to the students, research community and general citizenry of Florida."
     
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. "Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language."
     
Project Gutenberg   "Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart, who in 1971 decided that it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world. Since then, he has been joined by hundreds of volunteers who share his vision.
Now, more than thirty years later, Project Gutenberg has the following figures (as of November 8th 2002): 203 New eBooks released during October 2002, 1975 New eBooks produced in 2002 (they were 1240 in 2001) for a total of 6267 Total Project Gutenberg eBooks. 119 eBooks have been posted so far by Project Gutenberg of Australia."
     
Project Runeberg Project Runeberg has published over 200 works of Nordic literature on the Internet since its founding in 1992. Run by volunteers, the project aims to publish free electronic editions of old books from Sweden and Nordic countries. The project is supported by Linköping University and enlists the help of hundreds of volunteers worldwide.
Thomas (Library of Congress)   "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 from 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 Electronic Text Center   The Electronic Text Center has been building its collection of etexts since 1992 and currently has a collection strength of 70,000 texts mostly available online. Of these, 10,000 texts are publicly available. 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.
     
Xerox PARC   Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center has been instrumental in developing much of the technology that makes digital libraries possible. Since 1970, researchers at PARC have been developing the "architecture of information," and have invented "personal distributed computing, graphic user interfaces, the first commercial mouse, bit-mapped displays, Ethernet, client/server architecture, object-oriented programming, laser printing, and many of the basic protocols of the Internet." Their projects include work on Digital Libraries and on Human-Computer Interaction.
     

        

 
   VL Home    Introductory    VL Projects    VL Organizations    Terminology