Your Virtual Library

by Don Rittner

I have about 5,000 books and running out of room to store them. I would love to have all of them digitized and placed on a couple of CD-ROMS. Yeah, that would solve the problem. And as soon as I find another free hour in my 26 hour day, I’ll do it.

In the meantime, if you’re a lover of the classics and were not foolish enough to keep every book you collected in your life, you can do just that - access a virtual library of classic (and other) literature on the Net.

Computers are great for storing information, not just processing it. The cost of storage is cheap and getting cheaper. Since words are nothing more than strings of electrons, you can fit a great deal of them on a simple floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or hard drive.

Several educators and computer people with vision have begun to take many previously published works that are in the public domain, and OCR them (optical character reading - digitizing the page to grab the text). They also make them available to you for reading in a format as easy as clicking on your mouse and reading online, or by downloading a text file and firing up your word processor.

This week we are going to look at several of the best Web sites that specialize in providing what are called etexts in a variety of subject areas.

Project Gutenberg

http://promo.net/pg/

The first serious effort to bring the classics to you began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time by the folks of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

Instead of wasting it by playing computer games, he created Project Gutenberg, the first digital library and he began the project by typing in the "Declaration of Independence."

Eight years later, hundreds of classics are available from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, to Washington Irving’s Old Christmas, all free and in simple ASCII text format.

Electronic Text Center

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/index.html

The University of Virginia began the Electronic Text Center in 1992 to maintain Net accessible texts and images. They also offer the hardware and software to create them. Unlike Project Gutenberg, the ETC offers their collections in twelve languages.

The Center has about 45,000 online (and offline) humanities texts and more than 50,000 related images (book illustrations, covers, manuscripts, newspaper pages, page images of Special Collections books, museum objects).

The Web site is conveniently broken up into three sections: Online resources, Offline resources, and a link to other Web resources.

The Online resources are further broken down into categories like The Modern English Collection (AD 1500-present with about 2000 titles and thousands of images) with examples like all of Mark Twain’s writings, The Middle English Collection (40 titles) such as Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, and The Middle English Collection (3,000 titles). Some collections are not available to the public but are clearly marked.

The Offline resources are electronic databases and CD-ROM collections that you would have to access there.

The On-Line Books Page

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html

The On-Line Books Page was created by a former grad student John Mark Ockerbloom in 1993. It’s a directory of books that can be read on the Net and includes an index of thousands of online books, pointers to directories and archives of online texts, and special exhibits

The On-Line Books Page collaborates with The Universal Library Project, at Carnegie Mellon. You can search their database by typing in author or title, and there are about 9000 entries.

The site also features news, features such as banned books, and various other Net archives which are links to other excellent collections.

The Best Children's Literature (On The Net)

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Jardin/1630/

Here is a great Web site that specializes in children and young adult literature available for reading on the Net. From The Adventures of Aladdin to The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne.

The internet Public Library Online Texts Collection

http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/index.html

Here you can search their 9000 plus holdings by author, titles, or Dewey Decimal Classification (they still use this?)

Internet Modern History Sourcebook

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbookfull.html

If you have an interest in world history, or any history, this excellent Web site contains links to hundreds of etexts covering the Reformation to Post-World War II Religious Thought . This is a remarkable site that contains a wealth of historical documents but also contains sourcebooks to aid teachers of history.

The Poetry Archives

http://tqd.advanced.org/3247/index.html

The Poetry Archive just may be the largest collection of accessible classical poetry on the Net. It is a college student led project from Atlanta, Georgia.

It currently contains 3628 poems by 137 poets from Lascelles Abercrombie (1911-1912) to William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

You can search the database or view an alphabetical listing.

Don is the president of The Learning Factory at 251 River Street. You can reach him at drittner@aol.com.