FYI France: "digital libraries" in France, the BnF's Gallica -- "digital library" entre guillemets, because of the vagaries of this still - very - imprecise term: does it cover just "libraries which are digital", or "things digital which are libraries", or both, or neither? The Bibliothe`que nationale de France / "Gallica" solution to this leading Internet conundrum, now online via, http://www.fyifrance.com/restricted/fyi2dlib.htm#GALLICA http://www.bnf.fr http://gallica.bnf.fr is not the only "digital library", but it is impressive and it _is_ French. "Foreign" -- non - "anglo - saxon", non - "English / ame'ricain" -- Internet solutions no longer are unique, but they are comparatively rare, still. The online world swims now, and occasionally drowns, in "digital libraries" mounted in the US, Canada, the UK. The BnF's approach deserves attention, at least because it is "foreign". In addition, though, the BnF has made a remarkable achievement in itself in Gallica. The achievement certainly stands on its own -- "foreign" or not -- against the many other projects currently labeled "digital libraries". Gallica is the beginning of a well - planned and ambitious effort, to document French culture by bringing a practical maximum of what is available in digital formats to general public users via the Internet. It is a remarkable culture, and a remarkable effort interesting both for being "foreign" and for its own sake. The BnF Gallica site -- quick tour At Gallica a user now can see, online, a large and growing selection of the digitized documents collections of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France: "monographs, dictionaries, periodicals... from the simple page of poetry to collections containing over a thousand pages, from 16mo to quarto, from the popular press to bibliophiles' editions" -- it is the BnF's intention to make Gallica, "a laboratory for the evaluation of access to and distance consultation of digital documents". The "collection" which may be reached online eventually is to include 100,000 digitized printed volumes -- containing 30 million pages, for now supplemented by extracts from 250 volumes in the "Frantext" database of the CNRS / INALF -- and 300,000 digital images. (Frantext -- http://www.ciril.fr/~mastina/FRANTEXT -- is the source for the ARTFL database -- http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html -- the two offer the same data but use different search command structures) The general subject - concentration of the current Gallica effort very interestingly -- see below, about "preservation" -- is the French 19th century. Introductory texts are provided for that era's "history", "politics", "law", "economics", "social science", "literature", "philosophy", "history of science", and for each of four special collections, "Euge'ne Atget", "Pierre Loti", "Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chausse'es" and "livres illustre's". These introductory texts are excellent: they are erudite, brief, and interestingly illustrated, and they offer both internal links to materials found in Gallica itself and external links to the many sites listed in their footnotes. Multiple search criteria are available in Gallica: author, title words, publisher, date, subject, and the fulltext of the catalog entries and image captions. A 19th chronology has been mounted on the site: searching may be done directly from the chronology -- author name entries in the chronology are linked. A detailed "subject" list is available for searching, as well, offering 43 categories from which to choose (these do not, however, appear to correspond to the criteria used for the general search criteria mentioned above -- "histoire du monde ancien" finds 8 entries using the latter, only 4 using the former). Searching also may be done from online alphabetical authors' names and periodicals' names lists. Gallica's digital images come half from the BnF's departments -- Estampes et Photographie, Manuscrits, Arts du spectacle, Monnaies et me'dailles, and others -- and half from other museums, libraries, and organizations such as La Documentation Franc,aise, l'Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chausse'es, l'Institut Pasteur, l'Observatoire de Paris, Magnum, l'Agence France Presse. The technical spec's for Gallica are impressive, as they are for the BnF generally. About 2500 non - OCR / image - only monograph and periodicals texts currently are loaded: these were digitized at either 300 or 400 dpi in TIFF and CCIT group 4 compressed. 300 Frantext texts are loaded, which can be searched using "Frantext" commands. 7000 photographs, at either 2000x3000 or 1000x1500 in video resolution -- these must have been slides? -- and JPEG 10 compression, now are online. Gallica's server, supplied by Sequent, is the latter's new "NUMA-Q 2000" model ("Non-Uniform Memory Access" -- US $250,000, but the very latest thing in architectures -- parallel processing!, vs. "SMP" -- the approach which Sequent showed at Oracle OpenWorld in 1996), using a "System NTX2000" running 200 mhz Pentium Pro Quadra processors, Windows NT Server 4.0 and Information Server 3.0, and Oracle, with over 60 gig storage. This is all part of a general Sequent program to supply the BnF with 12 servers -- 2 of which are these high - end "NUMA-Q 2000's" -- for a total of over 100 processors and 1.4 terabytes of storage! (Someone please correct me if I have any of this wrong -- we're translating techspeak from French into English, here, and it's hard enough just in English -- but these are primarily the numbers which Sequent itself gives at the Gallica site and on its own site.) Gallica as a "digital library" -- general questions Several general questions can be asked of Gallica, then, as they might be asked of any project calling itself a "digital library": 1) compromises. What compromises, of quality and quantity and selection, have been made -- as they inevitably must -- to achieve a "practical" solution, and how are criteria to be reviewed and changed periodically as techniques and circumstances evolve? For example, the BnF has scanned in text here at low resolutions, without OCR, and already as been criticized heavily in the French library press for doing so. They also have faced the terrible questions of "selection", which to critics like Umberto Eco are so central to the digital decade and this century -- see FYI France ejournal issues of February and June 1993 -- and these BnF librarians have made their choices. And nevertheless -- unlike most of their critics -- they have produced a product and mounted a useful and attractive service. Gallica could serve at least as an object lesson in "the art of the possible" for digital libraries. 2) teaching. Digital information just has entered the era of the "un - interested user": the user who is not stupid but does not have time to, or just does not, care about computers and software and systems. It is a giant learning situation now: for inventors, developers, promoters and users, certainly, but also increasingly now for everyone else. Does this particular "digital library" effort help? Is it designed deliberately to be a teaching tool, and does it do this well? Remarkably, for a culture which has a reputation -- abroad certainly, but also among its own citizens -- for callousness with respect to the general public, this French "digital library" project greets users with an elaborate "feedback" page. Few other "digital library" projects elsewhere have thought to bother. 3) scaling up -- statics. Technical criteria for "digital library" success seem easily satisfied by the BnF, if not entirely yet by Gallica. * Multilingual access is a general BnF priority: its main Website screens are available in English. It would be good to see non - French language access to Gallica someday -- in the meantime critics might consider how many other "digital library" projects of comparable size provide multilingual screens and searching? * The politics of the BnF's development of their system with US and other non - French vendors, such as Sequent, would make a fascinating study. One wonders how much of the assembly and operating manuals are available in the customer's French? * Technical standards at the BnF generally and in Gallica in particular would be interesting to analyze. Will Sequent's "NUMA" scale up, for example -- or perhaps, rather, without it would Gallica or any other similar project ever be able to scale up at all -- ditto for "Oracle" and of course "NT" -- and are we gaining flexiblity and loosening things up, or are we simply building the next generation's dinosaurs? And what about the data, and the metadata?: are BnF cataloging norms keeping up -- all those digitized texts and images -- and are things being described so they may be identified, easily, several hardware / software / systems generations from now? Is the cataloging and indexing in fact being done? Is this a digital library "ad hoc", or "in futuro"? Much of the historical record which we have today of the French Middle Ages consists of nothing more than lists of books, the inventories of medieval collections, the works which they describe long ago having been damaged by water, eaten by bugs, burned, borrowed by a French king or Pre'sident and never returned, or "pillaged by the English" (the earliest Royal Library, according to the French)... * The role of the commercial world, finally, needs examination in France as it does anywhere else in the "digital libraries" world now. The cost of what Gallica and the BnF have achieved so far has been enormous. If Gallica is a project which can be financed by the French state, as an important part of the national "patrimoine culturel", how many other similarly - expensive projects might have to go to commercial sources -- and postures -- for their funds? A good cost - accounting, and hard thinking about financial resources and commercialism, seem to be necessary but much - ignored preludes to any "digital library" project -- certainly if the idea on the laptop ever is to scale up to something of the quality and size of Gallica. (see my "Internet Digital Libraries: the International Dimension", Boston & London : Artech House, 1996, ISBN 0-89006-875-5 -- Part III develops these "digital library" criteria) 4) scaling up -- dynamics. Gallica does not appear to have faced, yet, several of the most difficult problems which the rapid rate of change in the digital revolution will cause for it, however -- nor have other "digital libraries" projects, really, although a few of the best thinkers in the US NSF projects have worried greatly over them (Stanford's Terry Winograd -- see ref. supra ch. 14). * How to "institutionalize change", in a project like this, for a technology which replaces itself now every four months? Must the BnF undertake a complete revision of all of its hardware, software, systems and personnel on a quarterly basis, just to keep up? Non - hi - tech commercial firms barely manage this sort of broad organizational review every decade; every century, if they are lucky, for government departments and institutions like universities -- Yale's Bart Giamatti used to muse about his "20th century institution run on 15th century principles" -- and still longer for most archives and libraries. * How to integrate an effort like Gallica with other similar projects, and with resources which are not so similar? Sure, you can put a link to it on your Website, but does that really exhaust the store of the world's inter - woven knowledge on that "digital library's" subject? Technical standards -- mentioned above -- will help a "digital library" project like Gallica to work together with other digital resources. Wouldn't it be nice, though, for a student in Australia one day to be able to reach all sorts of printed and photographic and cinematic and even _sound_ evidence about Atget or Loti, physically located in all sorts of places, from -- to her -- a single source? Gallica's own immediate "context" are the magnificent surroundings of one of the world's greatest research libraries, and one of the Internet's better general "digital library" Websites -- http://www.bnf.fr -- but not all "digital library" projects are or will be so - blessed. * Preservation. Most interestingly, for the Gallica project, the era which they have chosen to work on is precisely the era most threatened currently by the "acid paper" preservation problem. Anything on paper from the 1830s to the 1970s -- books, periodicals, business records, personal letters, anything -- now is turning yellow and brittle and crumbling. Cotton rag paper from prior periods is not so threatened, and from the 1980s on we will have digital information on a variety of media. But for the intervening century - and - a - half "Umberto Eco's nightmare" is being realized: the 22nd century may have no evidence to examine of the 19th and the early 20th. Before the cynics say "just as well", consider that Gallica's choice of the 19th century as the era on which to concentrate -- a choice made for several reasons -- may prove ultimately to have been one of the best things about the project. 5) Books and bytes, bricks and digits -- does a "digital library" still need a "building"? Gallica probably has been expensive. The BnF's new Bibliothe`que Franc,ois Mitterrand building at Tolbiac certainly has been. Do we need both? If a "digital library" like Gallica can exist out in the aether, in Cyberspace, and eventually can satisfy most of our "information" needs, do we still need to construct and maintain expensive buildings, like the BFM? Predictions have been made of the death of books, of paper, of reading, and of libraries -- also of education, of culture, of intelligence -- all at the hands of the revolution in digital information: ask any parent, in France or the US or elsewhere, who worries today about online pornography and video games. The new techniques make many threats. Such threats are not taken seriously by many in the US. But France -- unlike the US -- is a place which has known, and suffered, through many "transitions in media" and cultural and political upheavals, throughout its longer and more violent history, transitions and upheavals which have destroyed "documents". For all the riches in the current collections of the BnF and other repositories of the national "patrimoine culturel", there is much more that is missing from the French historical record. This marks a fundamental difference between the perception of the risks involved in "transitions in media" as viewed in Omaha versus Lyon -- or foor that matter in any US location compared with Sarajevo, or Hiroshima, or Hanoi or Berlin or Moscow or anywhere else in the world which has both recent and longstanding memories of severe cultural loss -- outside the US, there is real and justifiable fear involved. The question of cultural loss from an accidental or purposeful loss of the BnF books is a very serious one in France: budgetary amounts for buildings or "digital library" projects there must be examined with this difference in mind. Now leave aside for the moment, though, the question of whether "digital libraries" which replace the buildings can happen or should, and assume that they will -- would that even be a "Good Thing"? There is a growing literature -- Arlie Hochschild et als. -- criticising or at least implying criticism of the "workaholic / yuppie" generation which has tried to mask neglect, of children and family life and to some degree sanity, behind labels such as "flextime" and "telecommuting" and "telework". Putting in longer hours "at the office" does not resolve the conflicts at home. Bringing work home -- via "telecommuting" and "telework" -- does no better, crowding "family life" nearly as much as "being away at the office" does. Some sort of "neutral place" is needed -- for work, for the voracious appetite for hours exhibited by all of these new "digital information" techniques: not the old office, for that increasingly is too far away from home, in the Paris and San Francisco of the 2 - hour - commute - 1990s -- but not the home either, if sanity and family life are to be held together in the Age of the Internet. So perhaps the local library? Perhaps a neutral, congenial, comfortable place, not at home but physically near it, a place in which to take up telework and telecommuting and Internet surfing of sites like Gallica, all without intruding on family time? And why should that space not, on occasion, be magnificent and monumental, like the new BFM? Was monumentality any more necessary for printed books than it might be sometimes now for the Internet? Perhaps the growing need for "neutral space" should be separated from questions of the monumental design of that space: we may or may not need the latter, but an information society of "digital libraries" like Gallica rapidly may be developing a tremendous and widespread need for the former. -- something else to think about, anyway, as you tour the Gallica site. (For more on this topic, see Michel Melot's introduction to "Nouvelles Alexandries : les grands chantiers de bibliothe`ques dans le monde", Paris : Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1996, ISBN 2765406197; also my "The Bibliothèque Nationale de France", in "Rational Space: Library Buildings for the 21st Century", T.D. Webb, editor, Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Co., [1998 forthcoming -- book title is provisional]). Samuel Beckett was a hopeful poet; and he wrote in French, in France. The future which he feared is portrayed in his plays: not too many libraries, or books, or information of any kind at all -- only a few lost and lonely people, with nothing to do and nowhere to go to do it. Beckett's nightmares were filled with loss: the loss of definition, the loss of meaning, the loss of any "sense of place". His characters Hamm and Clove spend their lives, together and apart, with little else to do, looking and waiting for "Godot". The French have recent and poignant memories of their own which match Beckett's nightmares, and a long history punctuated with the very disasters which he feared: "bouleverser" is a term which has much meaning in French political history, but is nearly un - translateable in the American context. The BnF's sometimes - maligned new Bibliothe`que Franc,ois Mitterrand building, and now its even newer Gallica online "digital library" exhibit of French culture, perhaps are two of the latest and best attempts to provide France and the rest of the 21st century with something very worthwhile to do, and an interesting and impressive "place" in Paris in which to do it. --oOo-- And... official ! (see Note1 below) -- French "Smileys", the definitive list: :-) Smiley de base :#) Smiley a trop bu :-# je ne peux rien dire =:-) Smiley est un punk :- surtout ne dites rien ,-) Smiley est content %-) ne regardez pas la te'le' :-* Smiley fait un bisou +:-) Smiley est un pre^tre :-\ Smiley est inde'cis :-{} Smiley et son rouge a`le`vres 3:] grand-me`re Smiley |-( Smiley a` mal a` la te^te O:-) Smiley est un saint :8) Smiley est un cochon :-@ cantatrice Smiley *<:o) Smiley est un clown :-[ Smiley est un vampire X-( Smiley a tre`s mal a` la te^te :-) Smiley aime REM et UZ (my acronymic French fails me -- anyone?) ([ ( Smiley est Robocop (Valenti & Co. penetrate the Hexagone!) ~~:-( j'ai si mal que ma te^te fume =:-( les vrais punks ne courent pas @:-} Smiley a e'te' chez le coiffeur :-% Smiley les a la` 7:^] Smiley en Ronald Reagan (-: Smiley est gaucher &-| j'en ai pleure' :-/ Smiley est septique |-o Smiley s'embe^te :-} Smiley est ge'ne' 8<:-) Smiley est un magicien :-& motus et bouche... :-~) Smiley a le nez qui coule :~| Smiley fume un peu :-V Smiley crie fort (:-( le Smiley le plus triste :-)8< la grande fille Smiley :^) Smiley joue Cyrano :-? Smiley fume la pipe :-(*) c'est a` gerber! C=:-) Smiley sait cuisinier :---} menteur comme Pinocchio P-( Smiley est un pirate :-'| Smiley a de la fie`vre :-r Smiley tire la langue :-# Smiley porte un appareil )O-) Smiley fait de la plonge'e (:-) Smiley a la grosse te^te 8:-) vous aimez mes lunettes :-> Smiley sarcastique :-X un gros bisou baveux :-] allez Paris St. Germain 8-O oh! mon Dieu! 8:-) la petite fille Smiley :-O Smiley parle beaucoup :-Q Smiley fume beaucoup [:-) Smiley a un Walkman :-" Smiley sait siffler ?-( oeil au beurre noir 8(:-) Smiley aime Mickey :-{ Smiley porte la moustache :=| Smiley est un babouin (Georges Perec would have _loved_ Smileys) Note1: "official" -- these are from Annexe 6 of the new "Internet: Enjeux juridiques / Rapport au ministre de'le'gue' a` la Poste, aux Te'le'communications et a` l'Espace et au ministre de la Culture / Mission Interministe'rielle sur l'Internet pre'side'e par Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin" (Paris : La documentation Franc,aise, 1997) Collection des rapports officiels. ISBN 2-11-003756-3 ISSN 0981-3764. Note2: So don't blame me -- I just report these things -- and anyway this list is "officiel", so presumably you _have_ to know about it... Bonne anne'e... --oOo-- FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071 - 5916 * | FYI France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic journal, | published since 1992 as a small - scale, personal, | experiment, in the creation of large - scale | "information overload", by Jack Kessler. Any material / \ written by me which appears in FYI France may be ----- copied and used by anyone for any good purpose, so // \\ long as, a) they give me credit and show my e - mail --------- address and, b) it isn't going to make them money: if // \\ if it is going to make them money, they must get my permission in advance, and share some of the money which they get with me. Use of material written by others requires their permission. FYI France archives are at http://infolib.berkeley.edu (search fyirance), or http://www.cru.fr/listes/biblio-fr@cru.fr/ (BIBLIO-FR econference archive), or at http://www.fyifrance.com , or at http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/pacs-l.html . Suggestions, reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison-pen letters all will be gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us . Copyright 1992- by Jack Kessler, all rights reserved.