Digitizing the world
Der Spiegel today has an article on a project to digitize the holdings of, eventually, some 30,000 libraries, museums and archives in Germany. This is an effort to provide a non-capitalist alternative to Google’s effort to digitize every book in the world. The article relates this German effort to a larger European project, Europeana, about which Spiegel had an article last October.
As a scholar, I don’t think one can overestimate the significance and usefulness of such efforts. Through the CUA Library, I have access online to the complete Patrologia Latina of Migne–some 230 volumes–with a fine search-engine that permits me to look up individual words or phrases, to find out where and how often two words appear near one another, etc. If one wanted, for example, to study the theme of holiness and sin in the Church in a single author (Augustine, e.g.) or in all the authors down to the beginning of the 13th century, one set of useful data would be gained by typing into the search engine the phrase from the Latin version of the Epistle to the Ephesians: sine macula et ruga (without zit or wrinkle) and within seconds one has every single instance. One can do something similar with the complete works of St. Thomas Aquinas that are available for free at the Corpus Thomisticum website. One can download texts from either source on to your own computer, searchable then by your ordinary program. All the works of John Henry Newman are available and in searchable form at http://www.newmanreader.org/
Those are only three that I use regularly. Such resources have already transformed scholarship, and there are literally thousands of other similar resources.
Do you have favorite sties/resources of your own?
I’m no scholar, but my copy of Bede fell apart years ago, and I visit Fordham’s Medieval Sourcebook frequently:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
OpenSource-wise, I used to use UNC’s ibiblio and Tuft’s Perseus Project often. Nowadays I use the pay services LexisNexis and Factiva routinely for commercial content.
I find the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy very helpful. It’s always been a work in progress:
“From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
I use Proquest’s Historical Newspapers with some frequency — the entire NY Times, Xtn Science Monitor, WaPo, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution, from first issue to a few years ago. And I have used the Times of London, which is now all digitized. I also use J-STOR, which has a good hundred (probably more) scholarly journals on line, from first issue to about 5 years ago. A wonderful resource. But most of the stuff I’ve used in my research isn’t digitzed, and never will be digitized.
And, of course, there’s a good deal of stuff on Gutenberg.com, all of it in the public domain. Various readers (of whom I am one) read some of these books into librivox.org, for people to download, play on their computers, put on their ipods, etc., all for no charge at all. The Venerable Bede, alas, is not among them, but a reading of Calvin’s Institutes is currently underway. And much of the Summa is up there, waiting to be read (me, I’ve been doing Trollope and Henry James, not quite so daunting).
I meant to add that most of those resources, like J-Stor, the Historical Newspapers, etc., are only open to those affiliated with a library — mostly college and university libraries — that subscribe to them.
I also make use of the Historical Newspapers and have found all kinds of things about two of my great-great-grandfathers in New York City in the 19th century. But I wish they would go on to do the other New York newspapers of the time, several of which were more important at the time than the relative late-comer, the NY Times.
I have 72 websites in my Dante folder, not all of them scholarly.
The best scholarly one is the Princeton Dante Project under the direction of Professor Robert Hollander.
http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/index.html
Here’s what it contains:
The Petrocchi text of the poem
New verse translation of the poem
Texts of all the Minor Works (with Translation)
Recitation of the poem in Italian
Historical and Interpretive Notes
Direct link to the Dartmouth Dante Project
Links to Dante sites all over the world
Especially valuable is the link to the Dartmouth Dante Project, also Hollander’s creation, which has commentaries dating from 1322 to 2007. For example, for the first line of the Inferno, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (Midway in the journey of our life) there are 76 commentaries, most in Italian but some in English also. Tozer and Carroll, Victorian Anglican clergymen are especially good, not necessarily for this line but generally.
Somewhat off-topic, but here’a a great piece on libraries and librarians. Check out the photos of some of the greatest libraries in the world.
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2010/02/twelve-theses-on-libraries-and.html
Antonio
A couple of gems from the above link:
4. At the same time, there is nobody more conservative than a librarian. Their enthusiasm for constant change and reinvention springs from an even deeper commitment to what has been received from the hand of the past. The library is an angel whose wings are spread out in fierce and loving protection of the past, while its face stares deep into the eerie light of the future.
5. In all the world there is nothing more dangerous than a library. Within any library are the seeds for the overthrow of the world. What bloody revolution cannot be traced back finally to a library? Or to some book that lay waiting through silent centuries for the day when it would be unsheathed? The rule of silence – upheld in all libraries since time immemorial – is a ruse. It is the silence of a tiger crouching in the reeds.