Amazon became a reference for global online commerce.
In July 2005, for its 10-year anniversary, Amazon had 9,000 employees, and 41 million clients enjoying attractive prices for a whole range of products they could get within 48 hours in one of the seven countries with an Amazon platform.
Amazon also sold more and more ebooks. In April 2005, it bought the French company Mobipocket, specialized in ebooks and readers (software) for PDAs.
In November 2007, Amazon launched its own reading device, named Kindle, with a catalog of 80,000 ebooks on Amazon's website. 538,000 Kindle were sold in 2008. A new version of Kindle, named Kindle 2, was launched in February 2009, with a catalog of 230,000 ebooks.
= What about small bookstores?
Local bookstores have closed one after the other, or have had a hard time keeping up with the competition of Amazon.com and other online bookstores. Amazon and others are also bad news for specialist bookstores, for example the travel bookstore created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France.
According to Catherine, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is the oldest travel bookstore in the world. Its 20,000 out-of- print or new books, maps and magazines - in a number of languages and about any country - are all packed up in a tiny space, in the heart of Paris, on Ile Saint-Louis, a small island surrounded by the Seine river.
Catherine has been a traveller since she was a child. She travels every summer - usually sailing on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic or the Pacific - while her boyfriend runs the bookstore. She is also a member of the French National Union of Antiquarian and Modern Bookstores (SLAM: Syndicat national de la librairie ancienne et moderne), the Explorers' Club (Club des explorateurs) and the International Club of Long-Distance Travelers (Club international des grands voyageurs).
Catherine visited 140 countries, and some trips were quite challenging. But her most difficult challenge was to set up a website on her own, from scratch, without knowing anything about computers. In December 1999, she wrote in an email interview: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but that doesn't worry me… I am very pessimistic though, because the internet is killing off specialist bookstores."
Some booksellers decided to run most of their business online, for example Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, the owners of Paulus Swaen Old Maps and Prints, a bookstore founded in 1978 in the Netherlands that relocated in 1996 in Florida. The bookstore offers maps, atlases and globes ranging from the 16th to the 18th century. The maps cover all parts of the world, and were produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The bookstore has also sold travel books and Medieval manuscripts. It has offered an online internet auction since November 1996, first twice a year, in March and November, and then four times a year, in March, May, September and November.
1996: THERE ARE MORE AND MORE TEXTS ONLINE
= [Overview]
Created in 1992, the Etext Archives were "home to electronic texts of all kinds". Created in 1993, the E-zine-list was a list of electronic zines around the world. The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe. In 1996, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives. In United Kingdom, the daily Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website called Times Online. The weekly publication The Economist also went online, as well as the weekly Focus and Der Spiegel in Germany, the daily Le Monde and Libération in France, and the daily El País in Spain. The computer press went logically online as well, first the monthly Wired, "the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", then ZDNet, another leading computer magazine. More and more "only" electronic magazines were also created.
= Electronic texts and newsletters
The Etext Archives were founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and hosted on the website of the University of Michigan. They were "home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to the personal". They provided electronic texts without judging their content, in six sections: (a) "E-zines": electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal; (b) "Politics": political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups; (c) "Fiction": publications of amateur authors; (d) "Religion", mainstream and off-beat religious texts; (e) "Poetry": an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and (f) "Quartz": the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.
As recalled on the website in 1998: "The web was just a glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was still the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast majority of users. The origin of the project has caused numerous people to associate it with the University of Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official relationship and the project is supported entirely by volunteer labor and contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the project maintainers. The project was started in response to the lack of organized archiving of political documents, periodicals and discussions disseminated via Usenet on newsgroups such as alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came later and was also a substantial source of both materials and regular contributors. Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines (e-zines) began their rapid proliferation on the internet, and it was clear that these materials suffered from the same lack of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the fact that the lines between e-zines (which at the time were mostly related to hacking, phreaking, and internet anarchism) and political materials on the internet were fuzzy enough that most e-zines fit the original mission of The Etext Archives. One thing led to another, and e-zines of all kinds - many on various cultural topics unrelated to politics - invaded the archives in significant volume."
Another list, the E-zine-list, was launched by John Labovitz in summer 1993 to list e-zines around the world, accessible via FTP, gopher, email, the web, and other services. The list was updated monthly.
What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on his website: "For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, 'zine' is short for either 'fanzine' or 'magazine', depending on your point of view. Zines are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre, and/or esoteric. Zines are not 'mainstream' publications - they generally do not contain advertisements (except, sometimes, advertisements for other zines), are not targeted towards a mass audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit. An 'e-zine' is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic networks like the internet."
3,045 zines were listed in November 1998. John wrote on his website: "Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e- zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'." After many years of maintaining this list, John passed the torch to others.
"Chroniques de Cybérie" was launched in November 1994 by Jean- Pierre Cloutier, a journalist living in Montreal, Quebec. As a weekly French-language report of internet news, Jean-Pierre's newsletter was sent by email to its subscribers (free subscription), and available on the web on a dedicated website (from April 1995). Bruno Giussani, journalist, wrote in The New York Times of November 25, 1997: "Almost no one in the United States has ever heard of Jean-Pierre Cloutier, yet he is one of the leading figures of the French-speaking internet community. For the last 30 months Cloutier has written one of the most intelligent, passionate and insightful electronic newsletters available on the internet, (…) an original mix of relevant internet news, clear political analysis and no-nonsense personal opinions. It was a publication that gave readers the feeling that they were living week after week in the intimacy of a planetary revolution."
"Venezuela Analítica" was a Spanish-language electronic magazine conceived as a public forum to exchange ideas on politics, economics, culture, science and technology. Roberto Hernández Montoya, its editor, wrote in September 1998: "The internet has been very important for me personally. It became my main way of life. As an organization it gave us the possibility to communicate with thousands of people, which would have been economically impossible if we had published a paper magazine. I think the internet is going to become the essential means of communication and of information exchange in the coming years."
= Print magazines go online
The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe.
In 1996, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives.
For example, the site of The New York Times site could be accessed free of charge, with articles of the print daily newspaper, breaking news updated every ten minutes, and original reporting only available online. The site of The Washington Post gave the daily news online, with a full database of articles, with images, sound and video.
In United Kingdom, the daily Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website called Times Online, with a way to create a personalized edition. The weekly publication The Economist went online, as well as the daily Le Monde and Libération in France, the daily El País in Spain, and the weekly Focus and Der Spiegel in Germany.
The computer press went logically online as well, first the monthly Wired, created in 1992 in California to cover cyberculture as "the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", then ZDNet, as a leading computer online magazine.
"More than 3,600 newspapers now publish on the internet", Eric K. Meyer stated in late 1997 in an essay published on the website of AJR/NewsLink. "A full 43% of all online newspapers now are based outside the United States. A year ago, only 29% of online newspapers were located abroad. Rapid growth, primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Brazil and Germany, has pushed the total number of non-U.S. online newspapers to 1,563. The number of U.S. newspapers online also has grown markedly, from 745 a year ago to 1,290 six months ago to 2,059 today. Outside the United States, the United Kingdom, with 294 online newspapers, and Canada, with 230, lead the way. In Canada, every province or territory now has at least one online newspaper. Ontario leads the way with 91, Alberta has 44, and British Columbia has 43. Elsewhere in North America, Mexico has 51 online newspapers, 23 newspapers are online in Central America and 36 are online in the Caribbean. Europe is the next most wired continent for newspapers, with 728 online newspaper sites. After the United Kingdom, Norway has the next most - 53 - and Germany has 43. Asia (led by India) has 223 online newspapers, South America (led by Bolivia) has 161 and Africa (led by South Africa) has 53. Australia and other islands have 64 online newspapers."
The online versions of these newspapers brought us a wealth of information. The web provided not only news available online, but also a whole encyclopedia to help us understand them. As readers, we could click on hyperlinks to get maps, biographies, official texts, political and economic data, photographs, and audio and video coverage. We could easily access other articles on the same topic with search engines sorting out articles by date, author, title, or subject.
1997: MULTIMEDIA CONVERGENCE AND EMPLOYMENT
= [Overview]
More and more people were using digital technology. Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was named "multimedia convergence", with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the ILO (International Labor Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with employers, unionists, and government representatives from all over the world. Some participants, mostly employers, demonstrated the information society was generating or would generate jobs, whereas other participants, mostly unionists, demonstrated there was a rise in unemployment worldwide, that should be addressed right away through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining, and fair labor rights, including for teleworkers.
= [In Depth]
As explained in the introduction of the symposium's proceedings: "With the advent of digitalization, technological convergence has been set into motion. Today all forms of information - whether based in text, sound or images - can be converted into bits and bytes for handling by computer. Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitalization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without distinct material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs, rather than simply books and records. (…)
Multimedia convergence deserves our attention for reasons which go far beyond the entertainment, mass media and telecommunications industries. The technological revolution which has made multimedia convergence possible will continue apace, creating new configurations among an ever-widening range of industries. The digitalization of information processing and delivery is transforming the way financial systems operate, the way enterprises exchange information internally and externally, and the way individuals work in an increasingly electronic environment."
Held in January 1997 at the ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the three-day Symposium on Multimedia Convergence intended to discuss the social and labor issues arising from this process. The industry-centred debates focused on three main concerns: (a) the information society: what it means for governments, employers and workers; (b) the convergence process: its impact on employment and work; and (c) labor relations in the information age. The purpose of these debates was "to stimulate reflection on the policies and approaches most apt to prepare our societies and especially our workforces for the turbulent transition towards an information economy."
One of the participants, Peter Leisink, an associate professor of labor studies at the Utrecht University, Netherlands, explained: "A survey of the United Kingdom book publishing industry showed that proofreaders and editors have been externalized and now work as home-based teleworkers. The vast majority of them had entered self-employment, not as a first- choice option, but as a result of industry mergers, relocations and redundancies. These people should actually be regarded as casualized workers, rather than as self-employed, since they have little autonomy and tend to depend on only one publishing house for their work."
Wilfred Kiboro, managing director of Nation Printers and Publishers, Kenya, made the following comments: "In content creation in the multimedia environment, it is very difficult to know who the journalist is, who the editor is, and who the technologist is that will bring it all together. At what point will telecom workers become involved as well as the people in television and other entities that come to create new products? Traditionally in the print media, for instance, we had printers, journalists, sales and marketing staff and so on, but now all of them are working on one floor from one desk."
Formerly, the production staff was keying in the articles, and not the editorial staff. Journalists and editors could now type in their articles online, and these articles went directly from text to layout. In book publishing, digitization speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the image editor and the layout staff to work at the same time on the same book.
Michel Muller, secretary-general of the French Federation of Book, Paper and Communication Industry (Fédération des industries du livre, du papier et de la communication), stated that, in France, jobs in this industry fell from 110,000 to 90,000 in the last decade (1987-1996), with expensive social plans to re-train and re-employ the 20,000 people who lost their jobs.
He also explained that, "if the technological developments really created new jobs, as had been suggested, then it might have been better to invest the money in reliable studies about what jobs were being created and which ones were being lost, rather than in social plans which often created artificial jobs. These studies should highlight the new skills and qualifications in demand as the technological convergence process broke down the barriers between the printing industry, journalism and other vehicles of information. Another problem caused by convergence was the trend towards ownership concentration. A few big groups controlled not only the bulk of the print media, but a wide range of other media, and thus posed a threat to pluralism in expression. Various tax advantages enjoyed by the press today should be re-examined and adapted to the new realities facing the press and multimedia enterprises. Managing all the social and societal issues raised by new technologies required widespread agreement and consensus. Collective agreements were vital, since neither individual negotiations nor the market alone could sufficiently settle these matters."
Quite theoretical compared to the unionists' concerns was the answer of Walter Durling, director of AT&T Global Information Solutions (United States): "Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. That has not happened. When television was developed, people had feared that it would do away cinemas, but it had not. One should not be afraid of the future. Fear of the future should not lead us to stifle creativity with regulations. Creativity was needed to generate new employment. The spirit of enterprise had to be reinforced with the new technology in order to create jobs for those who had been displaced. Problems should not be anticipated, but tackled when they arose." In short, humanity shouldn't fear technology.
In fact, employees were not so much afraid of technology as they were afraid of losing their jobs. In 1996, unemployment was already significant in any field, which was not the case when film and television were invented. What would be the balance between job creation and lay-off in the near future? Unions were struggling worldwide to promote the creation of jobs through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining for new jobs in digital technology, fair conditions for labor contracts and collective agreements, defense of copyright for the re-use of articles from the print media to the web, protection of workers in the artistic field, and defense of teleworkers as workers having full rights. The European Commission was expecting to have 10 million teleworkers in Europe by the year 2000, which would represent 20% of teleworkers worldwide.
Despite unions' efforts, would the situation become as tragic as suggested in a note of the symposium's proceedings? "Some fear a future in which individuals will be forced to struggle for survival in an electronic jungle. And the survival mechanisms which have been developed in recent decades, such as relatively stable employment relations, collective agreements, employee representation, employer-provided job training, and jointly funded social security schemes, may be sorely tested in a world where work crosses borders at the speed of light."
Twelve years later, outsourcing has become a "standard" in information technology, to cut the costs. How many companies care about fair labor conditions for the employees of their outsourcing partners?
1998: LIBRARIES TAKE OVER THE WEB
= [Overview]
The first library website was the one created by the Helsinki City Library in Finland, which went live in February 1994. Four years later, in 1998, more and more traditional libraries had a website as a new "virtual" window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf on a broad selection of websites on various topics. Libraries developed digital libraries alongside their standard collections, for a large audience to be able to access their specialized, old, local and regional collections, including images and sound. Librarians could now fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction - preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet). Library treasures went online, like Beowulf on the website of the British Library. Beowulf is the earliest known narrative poem in English, and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000, and digitized it for the world to enjoy.
= Libraries create websites
Libraries began creating websites as a "virtual" window, as well as digital libraries stemming from their print collections. Thousands of public works, literary and scientific articles, pictures and sound tracks became available on the screen for free.
On the one hand, books were taken out of their shelves only once to be scanned. On the other hand, books could easily be accessed anywhere at any time, without the need to go to the library and struggle through a lengthy process to access the original books, because of reduced opening hours, forms to fill out, safety concerns for rare and fragile books, and shortage of staff. Some researchers still remember the unfailing patience and an out-of-the-ordinary determination they needed to finally get to a given book in some cases. People could now access digital facsimiles, and access the original books only when needed.
Before broadband internet became mainstream, full-screen images were quite long to appear on the screen. After enthusiastically posting large image files, librarians decided to post small images that people could either see as is, or click on to get a larger format.
Some amazing image collections went online, for example American Memory, as "an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures".
SPIRO (Slide and Photograph Image Retrieval Online) was the Visual Online Public Access Catalog (VOPAC) for UC (University of California) Berkeley's Architecture Slide Library (ASL) collection of 200,000 35mm slides.
IMAGES 1 was the database of the Pictorial Collection at the National Library of Australia, with 15,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its influence in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs.
Librarians also helped patrons to surf on the web without being drowned, and to find the information they needed at a time search engines were less accurate. Library catalogs went online. Some patrons were already hoping that online catalogs would no longer only be a list of bibliographic records, and a prelude to a lengthy process to find the document itself if it didn't belong to their library - forms to fill out for interlibrary loan, fees to pay in some cases, and a long waiting period to finally get the book. They were hoping that, some day, bibliographic catalogs would give instant online access to the full text of books and journals.
= Gabriel in Europe
Gabriel - an acronym for "Gateway and Bridge to Europe's
National Libraries" - was launched as a trilingual (English,
French, German) website by the Conference of European National
Librarians (CENL).
As stated on the website in 1998: "Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose 'Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque' (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest theoretical works about libraries in any European language and provides a blueprint for the great modern research library. The name Gabriel is common to many European languages and is derived from the Old Testament, where Gabriel appears as one of the archangels or heavenly messengers. He also appears in a similar role in the New Testament and the Qu'ran."
In 1998, 38 national libraries participated in Gabriel: the
ones of Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, (Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia,
Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia,
San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
Turkey, United Kingdom, and Vatican City.
How did Gabriel begin? During the 1994 CENL meeting in Oslo, Norway, it was suggested that national libraries should set up a common electronic board with updates about their ongoing projects. Representatives from the national libraries of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), United Kingdom (British Library) and Finland (Helsinki University Library) met in March 1995 in The Hague, Netherlands, to launch the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries joined the project, the ones of Germany (Deutsche Bibliothek), France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa). Gabriel would describe their services and collections, while seeking to attract other national libraries into the project. The original Gabriel website was launched in September 1995. It was maintained by the British Library Network Services and mirrored by the national libraries of Netherlands and Finland.
In November 1995, other national libraries were invited to submit entries describing their services and collections. At the same time, more and more national libraries were launching their own websites and online catalogs. Gabriel also became a common portal for those.
During the 1996 CENL meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, it was decided that Gabriel would become an official CENL website in January 1997. Gabriel was maintained by the national library in the Netherlands, and mirrored by four other national libraries, in United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, and Slovenia.
Eight years later, in summer 2005, Gabriel merged with the European Library's website, as a common portal for the 43 national libraries in Europe. In March 2006, the European Commission launched the project of a European digital library, after a “call for ideas” from September to December 2005. This European digital library – named Europeana - opened its "virtual" doors in November 2008, with a crash from the server within 24 hours, followed by an experimental period with part of the collections.
In 1998, eight years before launching Europeana, the European Commission was running a Library Program(me) for public libraries, that aimed "to help increase the ready availability of library resources across Europe, and to facilitate their interconnection with the information and communications infrastructure. Its two main orientations will be the development of advanced systems to facilitate user access to library resources, and the interconnection of libraries with other libraries and the developing 'information highway'. Validation tests will be accompanied by measures to promote standards, disseminate results, and raise the awareness of library staff about the possibilities afforded by telematics systems."
In December 1998, according to a document posted on the website of the European Commission, 1,000 public libraries from 26 European countries had their own websites, that ranged from one webpage - with a postal address and opening hours - to several webpages - with full access to the library's OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) and a variety of services. The leading countries were Finland (247 libraries), Sweden (132 libraries), United Kingdom (112 libraries), Denmark (107 libraries), Germany (102 libraries), Netherlands (72 libraries), Lithuania (51 libraries), Spain (56 libraries), and Norway (45 libraries). Newcomers were the Czech Republic (29 libraries) and Portugal (3 libraries). Russia had a common website for 26 public reference libraries.
= Digital libraries
# A definition
What exactly is a digital library? The Universal Library Project, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, defined it in 1998 as "a digital library of digital documents, artifacts, and records. The advantage of having library material available in digital form is threefold: (1) the content occupies less space and can be replicated and made secure electronically; (2) the content can be made immediately available over the internet to anyone, anywhere; and (3) search for content can be automated. The promise of the digital library is the promise of great cost reductions while providing great increases in archive availability and accessibility. (…) There are literally thousands of digital library initiatives of a great many varieties going on in the world today. Digital libraries are being formed of scholarly works, archives of historical figures and events, corporate and governmental records, museum collections and religious collections. Some take the form of scanning and putting documents to the World Wide Web. Still other digital libraries are formed of digitizing paintings, films and music. Work even exists in 3D reconstructive digitization that permits a digital deconstruction, storage, transmission, and reconstruction of solid object."
Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous amount of data and make it available on the internet through a reliable search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and 1998 by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale online storage, using the digital library of the future as an example. It developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in 2000.
Another project was the Digital Library Initiative, supported by grants from NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). As mentioned on its website in 1998: "The Initiative's focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks - all in user-friendly ways."
The British Library was a pioneer in Europe. Brian Lang, chief executive of the library, explained on its website in 1998: "We do not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the future. Others anticipate that the impact will be slight. In the context of the British Library, printed books, manuscripts, maps, music, sound recordings and all the other existing materials in the collection will always retain their central importance, and we are committed to continuing to provide, and to improve, access to these in our reading rooms. The importance of digital materials will, however, increase. We recognize that network infrastructure is at present most strongly developed in the higher education sector, but there are signs that similar facilities will also be available elsewhere, particularly in the industrial and commercial sector, and for public libraries. Our vision of network access encompasses all these."
The Digital Library Programme was expected to begin in 1999. "The development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to the collection will become boundless with users from all over the world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials using computer networks, particularly the internet."
Another pioneer in Europe was the French National Library (BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France). The BnF launched its digital library Gallica in October 1997 as an experimental project to offer digitized texts and images from print collections relating to French history, life and culture. When interviewed by Jérôme Strazzulla in the daily Le Figaro of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of BnF, stated: "We cannot, we will not be able to digitize everything. In the long term, a digital library will only be one element of the whole library." The first step of the program, a major collection of 19th- century French texts and images, was available online one year later.
# Some projects
In Germany, the Bielefeld University Library (Bibliothek der Universität Bielefeld) began posting online versions of German rare prints in 1996. Michael Behrens, in charge of the digital library project, wrote in September 1998: "To some here, 'digital library' seems to be everything that, even remotely, has to do with the internet. The library started its own web server some time in summer 1995. (…) Before that, it had been offering most of its services via Telnet, which wasn't used much by patrons, although in theory they could have accessed a lot of material from home. But in those days almost nobody really had internet access at home… We started digitizing rare prints from our own library, and some rare prints which were sent in via library loan, in November 1996. (…)
In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting November 1996 and ending June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned as image files and made available via the web. During the same time, there were also a few digital materials prepared as accompanying material for lectures held at the university (image files as excerpts from printed works). These are, for copyright reasons, not available outside of campus. The next step, which is just being completed, is the digitization of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a German periodical from the Enlightenment, comprising 58 volumes, and 2,574 articles on 30,626 pages. A somewhat bigger digitization project of German periodicals from the 18th and early 19th century is planned. The size will be about 1,000,000 pages. These periodicals will be not just from the holdings of this library, but the project would be coordinated here, and some of the technical would be done here, also."
Other digital libraries were created from scratch, with no back up from a traditional library. They were "only" digital. This was the case of Athena in Switzerland, and Projetto Manuzio in Italy.
Athena was founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss teacher, and hosted on the website of the University of Geneva. Athena was created as a multilingual digital library specializing in philosophy, science, literature, history and economics, either by digitizing documents or by providing links to existing etexts. The Helvetia section provided documents about Switzerland. Geneva being the main city in French-speaking Switzerland, Athena also focused on putting French texts online. A specific page offered an extensive selection of other digital libraries worldwide, with relevant links.
Projetto Manuzio was launched by Liber Liber as as a free digital library for texts in Italian. Liber Liber is an Italian cultural association aimed at the promotion of any kind of artistic and intellectual expression. It wanted to link humanities and science by using computer technology in humanities. Projetto Manuzio was named after the famous 16th- century Venetian publisher who improved the printing techniques invented by Gutenberg.
As stated on its website in 1998, Projetto Manuzio wanted "to make a noble idea real: the idea of making culture available to everybody. How? By making books, graduation theses, articles, tales or any other document which could be digitized in a computer available all over the world, at any minute and free of charge. Via modem, or using floppy disks (in this case, by adding the cost of a blank disk and postal fees), it is already possible to get hundreds of books. And Projetto Manuzio needs only a few people to make such a masterpiece as Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia available to millions of people."
Some "only" digital libraries were organized around an author, for example The Marx/Engels Internet Archive (MEIA). MEIA was created in 1996 to offer a chronology of the collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and link this chronology to the digital versions of these works "as one work after another is brought online". As explained on the website in 1998: "There's no way to monetarily profit from this project. 'Tis a labor of love undertaken in the purest communitarian sense. The real 'profit' will hopefully manifest in the form of individual enlightenment through easy access to these classic works. Besides, transcribing them is an education in itself… Let us also add that this is not a sectarian/One-Great-Truth effort. Help from any individual or any group is welcome. We have but one slogan: 'Piping Marx & Engels into cyberspace!'"
A search engine was set up for the digital library. "As larger works come online, they will also have small search pages made for them alone - for instance, Capital will have a search page for that work alone."
The Biographical Archive gave access to biographies of Marx and Engels, as well as short biographies and photographs of their family members and friends. The Photo Gallery gathered photos of the Marx and Engels clan from 1839 to 1894, and their dwellings from 1818 to 1895, with "many more to come". The section “Others” included a list of works from all Marxist writers, for example James Connolly, Daniel DeLeon and Hal Draper, as well as a short biography. The Non-English Archive listed the works of Marx and Engels freely available online in other languages (Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish). It seems that the project was later renamed the Marxists Internet Archive.
= Library treasures go online
Libraries began digitizing their treasures, and putting the digital versions on the web for the world to enjoy. The British Library was a pioneer in this field. One of the first digitized treasures was Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English, and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the manuscript - some historians believe it might have been written circa 750. The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731. 18th-century transcripts mentioned hundreds of words and characters which were then visible along the charred edges, and subsequently crumbled away over the years. To halt this process, each leaf was mounted on a paper frame in 1845.
Scholarly discussions on the date of creation and provenance of the poem continue around the world, and researchers regularly require access to the manuscript. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for study not only raised conservation issues, it also made it unavailable for the many visitors who were coming to the British Library expecting to see this literary treasure on display. Digitization of the manuscript offered a solution to these problems, as well as providing new opportunities for researchers and readers worldwide.
The Electronic Beowulf Project was launched as a database of digital images of the Beowulf manuscript, as well as related manuscripts and printed texts. In 1998, the database included the fiber-optic readings of hidden characters and ultra-violet readings of erased text in the manuscript; the full electronic facsimiles of the 18th-century transcripts of the manuscript; and selections from the main 19th-century collations, editions and translations. Major additions to the database were planned for the following years, such as images of contemporary manuscripts, links to the Toronto Dictionary of Old English Project, and links to the comprehensive Anglo-Saxon bibliographies of the Old English Newsletter.
The database project was developed in partnership with two leading experts in the United States, Kevin Kiernan, from the University of Kentucky, and Paul Szarmach, from the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. Professor Kiernan edited the electronic archive and supervised the making of a CD-ROM with the main electronic images.
Brian Lang, chief executive of the British Library, explained on its website in 1998: "The Beowulf manuscript is a unique treasure and imposes on the Library a responsibility to scholars throughout the world. Digital photography offered for the first time the possibility of recording text concealed by early repairs, and a less expensive and safer way of recording readings under special light conditions. It also offers the prospect of using image enhancement technology to settle doubtful readings in the text. Network technology has facilitated direct collaboration with American scholars and makes it possible for scholars around the world to share in these discoveries. Curatorial and computing staff learned a great deal which will inform any future programmes of digitization and network service provision the Library may undertake, and our publishing department is considering the publication of an electronic scholarly edition of Beowulf. This work has not only advanced scholarship; it has also captured the imagination of a wider public, engaging people (through press reports and the availability over computer networks of selected images and text) in the appreciation of one of the primary artefacts of our shared cultural heritage."
Other treasures of the British Library were available online as well: "Magna Carta", the first English constitutional text, signed in 1215, with the Great Seal of King John; the "Lindisfarne Gospels", dated 698; the "Diamond Sutra", dated 868, sometimes referred to as the world's earliest print book; the "Sforza Hours", dated 1490-1520, an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the "Codex Arundel", a notebook from Leonardo Da Vinci, in the late 15th or early 16th century; and the "Tyndale New Testament", as the first print version in English by Peter Schoeffer in Worms.
New treasures followed. The digitized version of the Bible of Gutenberg was available online in November 2000. Gutenberg printed its Bible in 1454 or 1455 in Germany, perhaps printing 180 copies, with 48 copies still available in 2000, and three copies - two full ones and one partial one - at the British Library. The two full copies - a little different from each other - were digitized in March 2000 by Japanese experts from Keio University of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Communications). The images were then processed to offer a full digital version on the web a few months later.
1999: LIBRARIANS GET DIGITAL
= [Overview]
The job of librarians, that had already changed a lot with computers, went on to change even more with the internet. Electronic mail became commonplace for internal and external communications. Librarians could subscribe to newsletters and participate in newsgroups and discussion forums. In 1999, librarians were running intranets for their organizations, like Peter Raggett at the OECD Library, or they were running library websites, like Bruno Didier at the Institute Pasteur Library. Computers made catalogs much easier to handle, as well as library loans and book orders. This was the case for Anissa Rachef at the French Institute in London. Librarians could type in bibliographic records in a computer database that was sorting out book records by alphabetical order, with search engines for queries by author, title, year and subject. By networking computers, the internet gave a boost to union catalogs for a state, a province, a department, a country or a region, and made things simpler for interlibrary loan.
= Two experiences
# At the OECD
The OECD Library was among the first ones in Europe to set up an extensive intranet for the staff of its organization. What is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich, in that OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club. Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The core of original members has expanded from Europe and North America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to membership." (excerpt from its website in 1999)
The OECD Central Library serves the OECD staff to support their research work, with more than 60,000 monographs and 2,500 periodicals in early 1999, as well as microfilms and CD-ROMs, and subscripions to databases like Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and UnCover.
Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library, first worked in government libraries in United Kingdom before joining the OECD in 1994. An avid internet user since 1996, Peter wrote in August 1999: "At the OECD Library we have collected together several hundred websites and have put links to them on the OECD intranet. They are sorted by subject and each site has a short annotation giving some information about it. The researcher can then see if it is possible that the site contains the desired information. This is adding value to the site references and in this way the Central Library has built up a virtual reference desk on the OECD network. As well as the annotated links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of references to articles, monographs and websites relevant to several projects currently being researched at the OECD, network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new acquisitions. The Library catalogue will soon be available for searching on the intranet. The reference staff at the OECD Library uses the internet for a good deal of their work. Often an academic working paper will be on the web and will be available for full-text downloading. We are currently investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the internet."
What about finding information on the internet? "The internet has provided researchers with a vast database of information. The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never has the information overload been so obvious as when one tries to find information on a topic by searching the internet. When one uses a search engine like Lycos or AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo!, it soon becomes clear that it can be very difficult to find valuable sites on a given topic. These search mechanisms work well if one is searching for something very precise, such as information on a person who has an unusual name, but they produce a confusing number of references if one is searching for a topic which can be quite broad. Try and search the web for Russia AND transport to find statistics on the use of trains, planes and buses in Russia. The first references you will find are freight-forwarding firms who have business connections with Russia."
How about the future? "The internet is impinging on many peoples' lives, and information managers are the best people to help researchers around the labyrinth. The internet is just in its infancy and we are all going to be witnesses to its growth and refinement. (…) Information managers have a large role to play in searching and arranging the information on the internet. I expect that there will be an expansion in internet use for education and research. This means that libraries will have to create virtual libraries where students can follow a course offered by an institution at the other side of the world. Personally, I see myself becoming more and more a virtual librarian. My clients may not meet me face-to-face but instead will contact me by email, telephone or fax, and I will do the research and send them the results electronically."
# At the Pasteur Institute
"The Pasteur Institutes are exceptional observatories for studying infectious and parasite-borne diseases. They are wedded to the solving of practical public health problems, and hence carry out research programmes which are highly original because of the complementary nature of the investigations carried out: clinical research, epidemiological surveys and basic research work. Just a few examples from the long list of major topics of the Institutes are: malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, yellow fever, dengue and poliomyelitis." (excerpt from the website in 1999)
Bruno Didier, librarian and webmaster of the library website, explained in August 1999: "The main aim of the Pasteur Institute Library website is to serve the Institute itself and its associated bodies. It supports applications that have became essential in such a big organization: bibliographic databases, cataloging, ordering of documents and of course access to online periodicals (presently more than 100). It is a window for our different departments, at the Institute but also elsewhere in France and abroad. It plays a big part in documentation exchanges with the institutes in the worldwide Pasteur network. I am trying to make it an interlink adapted to our needs for exploration and use of the internet. The website has existed in its present form since 1996 and its audience is steadily increasing. (…) I build and maintain the webpages and monitor them regularly. I am also responsible for training users. The web is an excellent place for training and it is included in most ongoing discussion about that."
How about the future? "Our relationship with both the information and the users is what changes. We are increasingly becoming mediators, and perhaps to a lesser extent 'curators'. My present activity is typical of this new situation: I am working to provide quick access to information and to create effective means of communication, but I also train people to use these new tools. (…) I think the future of our job is tied to cooperation and use of common resources. It is certainly an old project, but it is really the first time we have had the means to set it up."
= Online catalogs
# OPACs
The internet boosted library catalogs through cyberspace. OPACs (OPAC: Online Public Access Catalog) were more attractive and user-friendly than the older print and computer catalogs. Some catalogs began to give instant online access to the full text of books and journals, something that would become a major trend ten years later.
The first step was UNIMARC, as a common bibliographic format for library catalogs. The IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) published the first edition of "UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format" in 1977, followed by a second edition in 1980 and a "UNIMARC Handbook" in 1983.
UNIMARC (Universal Machine Readable Cataloging) was set up as a solution to the 20 existing national MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) formats. 20 formats meant lack of compatibility and extensive editing when bibliographic records were exchanged. With UNIMARC, catalogers would be able to process records created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC format would first be converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted into another MARC format. UNIMARC would also be promoted as a format on its own.
In May 1997, the British Library launched OPAC 97 to provide free online access to the catalogs of its main collections in London and Boston Spa. It also launched Blaise, an online bibliographic information service (with a small fee), and Inside, a catalog of articles from 20,000 journals and 16,000 conferences. As explained on the website at the time: "The Library's services are based on its outstanding collections, developed over 250 years, of over one hundred and fifty million items representing every age of written civilisation, every written language and every aspect of human thought. At present individual collections have their own separate catalogues, often built up around specific subject areas. Many of the Library's plans for its collections, and for meeting its users' needs, require the development of a single catalogue database. This is being pursued in the Library's Corporate Bibliographic Programme which seeks to address this issue." The "single catalogue database" was fully operational a few years later.
Another leading effort was the one of the Library of Congress with its Experimental Search System (ESS). The ESS was "one of the Library of Congress' first efforts to make selected cataloging and digital library resources available over the World Wide Web by means of a single, point-and-click interface. The interface consists of several search query pages (Basic, Advanced, Number, and a Browse screen) and several search results pages (an item list of brief displays and an item full display), together with brief help files which link directly from significant words on those pages. By exploiting the powerful synergies of hyperlinking and a relevancy-ranked search engine (InQuery from Sovereign Hill Software), we hope the ESS will provide a new and more intuitive way of searching the traditional OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog)." (excerpt from the website in 1998)
Another interesting - and totally different - initiative was the creation of the Internet Public Library (IPL) by the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan. The IPL went live in March 1995 as the first U.S. digital public library to serve the internet community, and to catalog websites and webpages. The librarians' task was to choose the best documents available on the web, and process them as library documents for them to be easily accessed from the IPL website, that acted as a portal. The IPL sections were: Reference, Exhibits, Magazines and Serials, Newspapers, Online Texts, and Web Searching. There were also Teen and Youth sections. All items were carefully selected, catalogued and described by the IPL staff. As an experimental library, IPL also listed the best internet projects that were run by librarians, in the section Especially for Librarians. Since then, students from the IPL Consortium, a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science, have worked on maintaining and developing the IPL as a public library for the web.
# Union catalogs
In 1999, the two main union catalogs were WorldCat, run by OCLC
(Online Computer Library Center), and RLIN (Research Library
Information Network), run by the Research Libraries Group
(RLG).
What exactly is a union catalog? The idea behind a union catalog is to earn time by avoiding the cataloging of the same document by many catalogers worldwide. When catalogers of a member library catalog a new document, they first search the union catalog. If the record is available, they import it into their own library catalog and add the local data. If the record is not available, they create it in their own library catalog and export it into the union catalog. The new record is immediately available to all catalogers of member libraries. Depending on their status, experience and quality of cataloging, member libraries can either import records only, or import and export records.
OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) was created in 1971 as a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering access to the world's information while reducing information costs. The OCLC Online Union Catalog - renamed WorldCat much later - began as the union catalog of the university libraries in the State of Ohio. Over the years, OCLC became a national and then worldwide library cooperative, and WorldCat the largest library catalog in the world. In early 1998, WorldCat had 38 million records in 400 languages - with transliteration for non-Roman languages) - and an annual increase of 2 million records. In 1998, 27,000 libraries in 65 countries were using OCLC services (paid subscription) to manage their collections and provide online reference services.
WorldCat has only accepted one bibliographic record per document, unlike RLIN (Research Library Information Network), launched by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) in 1980. RLIN accepted several records per document, with 88 million records in early 1998.
Members of RLG were mainly research and specialized libraries. RLIN was later renamed the RLG Union Catalog. Its free web version, RedLightGreen, was launched in fall 2003 as a beta version, and in spring 2004 as a full version. This was a major move, not only for library members, but for all internet users, who could also access it for free.
In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400 languages, from 9,000 member libraries in 112 countries. In 2006, 73 million bibliographic records were linking to one billion documents available in these libraries.
In August 2006, WorldCat began to migrate to the web through the beta version of its new website worldcat.org. Member libraries now provided free access to their catalogs and electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full- text articles, photos, music CDs and videos. RedLightGreen ended its service in November 2006, and RLG joined OCLC.
2000: INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE IN MANY LANGUAGES
= [Overview]
2000 was a turning point for a multilingual internet, both for its content and its users. In summer 2000, non-English-speaking users reached 50%. This percentage went on to increase steadily: 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 - with 34.9% non-English- speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians - and 64.2% in March 2004 - with 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians (source: Global Reach). The internet is also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who teaches computing at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. Caoimhín also maintains the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, with a bilingual (English, Gaelic) list of European minority languages. He wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell- checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of this size available in Gaelic."
= "Language nations"
At first, the internet was nearly 100% English. Born in the United States, it spread in North America before taking over the whole planet. Then people from all continents began connecting to the internet and posting webpages in their own languages. In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased from nearly 100% to 85% (reached in 1997 or 1998, depending on the sources).
In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies (language translation services) and the Internet Society - ran the first major study relating to distribution of languages on the web. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.
In July 1998, according to Global Reach, a company specializing in international online marketing, the fastest growing groups of internet users were non-English-speaking: Spanish-speaking, 22.4%, Japanese-speaking, 12.3%; German-speaking, 14%; and French-speaking, 10% - with 56 million non-English-speaking users. More than 80% of all webpages were still in English, whereas only 6% of the world population spoke English as a native language (16% spoke Spanish).
Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing for Globalink, a company specializing in language translation software and services. He wrote in September 1998: "85% of the content of the web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non- English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites."
Randy also brought up the concept of "language nations": "Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'… all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco."
Robert Ware created OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996, as a "fast finder" of words in hundreds of online dictionaries. He wrote about an experience he had in 1994, that showed the internet could promote both a common language and multilingualism: "In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me… the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around the world. Distance and geography no longer mattered! OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German which was his mother tongue. The internet has removed one barrier (distance) but with that comes the barrier of language. It seems that the internet is moving people in two quite different directions at the same time. The internet (initially based on English) is connecting people all around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people to use for communication. But it is also creating contact between people of different languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A common language is great but in no way replaces this need. So the internet promotes both a common language *and* multilingualism. The good news is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is creating incentives for people around the world to create improved language courses and other assistance, and the internet is providing fast and inexpensive opportunities to make them available."
The internet could also be a tool to develop a "cultural identity". During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized by the International Labor Office (ILO) in January 1997, Shinji Matsumoto, general secretary of the Musicians' Union of Japan (MUJ), explained: "Japan is quite receptive to foreign culture and foreign technology. (…) Foreign culture is pouring into Japan and, in fact, the domestic market is being dominated by foreign products. Despite this, when it comes to preserving and further developing Japanese culture, there has been insufficient support from the government. (…) With the development of information networks, the earth is getting smaller and it is wonderful to be able to make cultural exchanges across vast distances and to deepen mutual understanding among people. We have to remember to respect national cultures and social systems."
As the internet quickly spread worldwide, more and more people in the U.S. realized that, although English may stay the main international language for exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English and, even so, people prefer to read information in their own language. To reach as large an audience as possible, companies and organizations needed to offer bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual websites, while adapting their content to a given audience. Thus the need of both internationalization and localization, which became a major trend in the following years, not only in the U.S. but in many countries, where foreign companies set up bilingual websites - in their language and in English - to reach a wider audience, and get more clients.
Translation software available on the web was far from perfect, but was helpful, because instantaneous and free, unlike a high- quality professional translation. In December 1997, AltaVista, a leading search engine, was the first to launch such software with Babel Fish - also called AltaVista Translation -, which could translate webpages (up to three pages at the same time) from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by Systran, a company specializing in machine translation. This initiative was followed by others, with free and/or paid versions on the web, developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, IBM (with the WebSphere Translation Server), Softissimo, Champollion, TMX or Trados.
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), brought up the concept of "linguistic democracy" in September 1998: "Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early '50s, 'mother-tongue surfing' may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the internet is to truly become the Global Network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't."
Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cybérie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. He wrote in August 1999: "We passed a milestone this summer. Now more than half the users of the internet live outside the United States. Next year, more than half of all users will be non English-speaking, compared with only 5% five years ago. Isn't that great?"
The internet did pass this second milestone in summer 2000, with non-English-speaking users reaching 50%. As shown in the statistics of Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (with 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians), and 64.2% in March 2004 (with 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians).
= From ASCII to Unicode
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for information interchange in English. It was published in 1968 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and 1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), i.e. the ones that are available on the English/American keyboard.
With the use of other European languages, extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were created as sets of 256 characters to add accented characters as found in French, Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for French.
Yoshi Mikami, who lives in Fujisawa, Japan, launched the
bilingual (Japanese, English) website "The Languages of the
World by Computers and the Internet", also known as Logos Home
Page or Kotoba Home Page, in late 1995. Yoshi was the co-author
(with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual
Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published by
O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into
English, French and German.
Yoshi Mikami explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese and American English. I was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the web The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating multilingual web pages, which was published in August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject."
Yoshi added in the same email interview: "Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and multilingual pages on the internet, not a simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan are written in Japanese."
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), explained in September 1998: "A pull from non-English- speaking computer users and a push from technology companies competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing area in software and hardware development. This development has not been as fast as it could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This meant that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and symbols used in variants of the English alphabet - mostly used by European languages. But only one language could be displayed on a page at a time. (…) The most recent development is Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system translates each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8-byte Extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on the computer. So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can at least surf the web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used - such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice."