In late 1999, the Internet Archive also became an online library of
text, audio, software, image and video content, for example some books
of the Million Book Project (10,520 books in April 2005), films for the
period 1903-1973, live concerts, software, sites about September 11,
sites about elections, and sites about the web pioneers, with all
collections freely available on the web.
As a side remark, the Million Book Project, also called the Universal
Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL), was launched in January
2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania) with the aim to
digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in
libraries from India and China. The project was completed in 2007, with
one million books available on the university website, as image files
in DjVu and TIFF formats, and three mirror sites (India, Northern
China, Southern China).
In October 2005, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content
Alliance (OCA) as a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and
governmental organizations, with the aim to build a world public
permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia
content. The OCA started to digitize public domain books around the
world, and to include them in the collection of the Internet Archive.
1996 > LIBRARIES LAUNCHED WEBSITES
[Summary]
The Helsinki City Library in Finland was the first library to launch a
website, which went live in February 1994. Two years later, more and
more libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their
patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the
online catalog, and surf a broad selection of websites on various
topics. Libraries developed digital libraries alongside their standard
collections, so that anyone could access their specialized, old, local
and regional collections, including for images and sound. Librarians
could finally fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction:
preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet). Debates
were fierce about the assets of the print book versus the digital book,
and vice versa.
***
In the mid-1990s, libraries started their own websites as a virtual
window for their patrons and beyond, with an online catalog and a
digital library.
In his book “Books in My Life”, published by the Library of Congress in
1985, Robert Downs, a librarian, wrote: "My lifelong love affair with
books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and
all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."
Automation and computers were followed by the internet (1974) and the
web (1990), and eased the work of librarians in some way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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