DIGITAL LIBRARIES
ERCIM News No.27 - October 1996



Bibliotheca Universalis -
G7 Project
on Electronic Libraries

by Sonia Zillhardt
Bibliotheca Universalis is one of the eleven G7 projects launched during the G7 Information Society conference held in Brussels in February 1995.

The partners of the project are :

Pilots
Partners


Logo of Bibliotheca Universalis 'Planètes: les mystères de l'infini'
by Grandville, in 'Un autre monde', 1844
(by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France).

Objectives

The main objective of Bibliotheca Universalis is to make the major works of the world's scientific and cultural heritage accessible to a vast public via multimedia technologies, thus fostering the exchange of knowledge and dialogue over national and international borders. The aim is to exploit existing digitization programs in order to build up a large distributed virtual collection of knowledge and make it available via the global communication networks, enhancing the services to the end users. In this way, it is hoped to advance international cooperation towards the establishment of a global electronic library system.

Bibliotheca Universalis should strengthen the function of libraries and improve international availability of digitized resources, including not only bibliographic records but also the information content (integrating text, graphics, still images, sound and video information). It will promote large scale digitizing techniques and encourage the definition and adoption of global standards. Furthermore, it should demonstrate how integrated digitization techniques can support long term preservation as well as enabling immediate access to the information digitized. The project initially involves national libraries and other major libraries and could be extended to other countries than G7. All documents would belong to the public domain.

Context

In most countries, considerable efforts have been taken, often for centuries, to preserve, describe and index the national cultural wealth. More recently, libraries have begun to digitize at least part of this information. Digitization means creating multimedia databases enhanced by digital information, and thus offering easy access to cultural and scientific heritage for a large population of users. This digitization effort will have to be continued for a number of years to reach some degree of coverage. The intention is to build up rapidly very large information services containing millions of documents.

Bibliotheca Universalis should provide a practical framework for international cooperation; whilst building on existing initiatives, it will address inter-operability problems, thus creating an open environment which can facilitate participation beyond G7 countries. It should also stimulate the effective management of these cultural and knowledge resources and the development of functions for user friendly retrieval of relevant information. It will address the needs of the general public, researchers, scholars and students.

Architecture

A network architecture with dedicated hosts and a common interface for retrieval and navigation tools will be implemented. Existing standards in the fields of text, image and sound digitization and of communication protocols will be employed.
Technological priorities concern the network environment, the management of distributed systems based on client/server model, and advanced retrieval functionalities. The navigation tools must allow the end user to:

Actions so far

The project held its first general meeting in May, 1995, in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This meeting resulted in a clarification of objectives and a plan of action for 1996. A web server has been created by the French Ministry of Culture to provide up to date information on the project: http://www.culture.fr. One of the major difficulties identified by the partners is that of funding; until now the entire initiative has been based on partners' own resources without any extra external funding.

In May 1996, Bibliotheca Universalis presented a prototype built around the theme Africa, Culture and Civilisation at the G7 Midrand conference on the Information Society and Development. The objectives of the prototype were:
The audience could observe the interactivity and ease of access to virtual and distributed digitized collections held by national libraries and other cultural institutions, how this knowledge can be effectively acquired and used by the end-user. Access was given to samples of digitized texts, images and sounds on the theme of Africa.

This demo was very successful in terms of international visibility with strong expressions of interest from the vice-president of South Africa, and representatives from Unesco, the European Commission and the official American delegation. All stressed the importance of the role of libraries in the Global Information Society.

Next Steps

First, the prototype must be given public access on Internet. Second, the partners will launch a very detailed survey on existing digitization programs, both at the library and the national levels. In addition to descriptions of the collections and their contents, political, technological, and legal issues will be covered. The results of this survey will be discussed by the partners at the next G7 general meeting, planned for the first quarter of 1997.

Please contact:
Sonia Zillhardt - Bibliothèque nationale de France
Tel: +33 1 47 03 77 08
E-mail: sonia.zillhardt@bnf.fr
or Gaëlle Bequet - Ministère de la Culture
Tel: +33 1 40 15 73 01
E-mail: bequet@opera.culture.fr
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