Till Kinstler wrote:
> We don't need a German Digital Library. There is already a Global
> Digital Library, so "GDL" is already taken as a trademark, sorry (ok,
> the German version uses DDB as label): "the net". We just need to put
> these cultural heritage things on the Web in a usable way, not into a
> centralized German national portal. That's hard enough, as we see in our
> daily work.
> There are sentences like "[...] digitalisiertes Kulturgut [...] zentral
> über das Internet zur Verfügung zu stellen" (my translation: provide
> central access to digitized cultural heritage over the Internet) and
> "Aufbau und Betrieb eines zentralen nationalen Zugangsportals" (my
> translation: development and operation of a central, national access
> portal) in the formal agreement that make me wonder whether they finally
> understood the decentralized nature of the Internet. The Internet works
> so well (eg as a digital library) because of its decentralized structure.
> That "German Digital Library" approach sounds like the next big
> libraryland silo to me... Haven't we finally learned those don't work?
This sounds good, but then we run into the problem of finding materials. As only one example, there is a gorgeous, important sites put up by the Biblioteca Hertziana here in Rome (with the Max Planck Institut) and they put up a selection of their early printed guides to Rome (an important collection). http://www.biblhertz.it/deutsch/opac/dignel/digi-bhr-200.html
These are some of my favorite scanned books on the web, and the Hertziana did it right, but how you find them without knowing about this site, I don't know, e.g. the very first one: Mirabilia Roma (1475) gets lost in a regular Google search. As a result, these valuable materials are swallowed up in the depths of Google.
I think there are solutions, and these solutions need the skills of librarians and especially catalogers. But I don't know if doing things the same, old way (making full-level MARC21/LCSH/LCC/LCNAF records) is a genuine, sustainable solution. I also don't know if we need a single database to search, or more of a federated one, such as at the European Library: http://search.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/en/index.html or even something different like a torrent engine, or something I don't know about.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Thu Dec 03 2009 - 09:10:29 EST