Page 148 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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Digital libraries and other online reading services, many-sided and global access to culture
The Internet has made available to us a global content library. Ways of accessing knowledge and stories have progressively proliferated and have been customised to reach the whole of society and cater as closely as possible to each reader’s specific needs: open-access digital libraries, digital learning services offered by analogue libraries, distribution platforms that provide open-source content, cloud reading services – a variety of reading materials in very diverse formats that we will go on to examine.
Large open-access digital libraries
One of the main open-access Internet libraries houses the holdings of the Project Gutenberg (PG),94 which dates back to 1971 and sets out to foster the creation and distribution of eBooks.95 The content it compiles is chiefly public domain: historically significant literature and reference works (54,000 items) published in several lan- guages (including Spanish) and formats (eBooks, audiobooks). Its motto is “break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy”, a reference to its commitment to public literacy and its gratitude to the work of public libraries.
The Internet Archive96 is an open digital library created in 1996 and run by a not-for-profit organisation devoted to preserving archives, web captures, multimedia resources and software.
It has the support of Alexa Internet and other collaborators who have donated materials and collections, such as the Library of Congress and many other public and private libraries. It houses a large number of files of all kinds: text, audio and video, most of which are public domain or have Creative Commons or other licences that allow them to be distributed free of charge.
Europeana97 is an open-access European digital library in several languages (including Spanish)
that was launched in 2008 (though the project was started up in 2005) and brings together mil- lions of digitised contributions from recognised cultural institutions of the European Union member states (it currently contains more than 51 million files in various languages and formats). Its holdings include books, newspapers, films, sound files, paintings, maps and manuscripts, among others.
Other interesting examples are:
• The Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (BDH),98 an online resource of Spain’s national library, the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), which provides open and free access to thousands of documents digitised by the library: manuscripts, print books dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth cen- turies, drawings, prints, leaflets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historical press, sound recordings ...;
• The European Library (TEL),99 a project run by the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL), which offers open access to the collections of the 48 national libraries of Europe and of leading research libraries in Europe. Users can choose from more than 28 million digital objects and more than 175 million library records;
• The World Digital Library (WDL),100 an international digital library created by the United States Library of Congress providing access to more than 17,000 articles on 193 countries spanning the period from 8000 BC to AD 2000;
• The Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano (BDPI),101 a project run by the Asociación de Bibliotecas Nacionales de Iberoamérica (Abinia), which sets out to cre- ate a portal providing single-point access to the digital resources of all the participating Ibero-American libraries. It includes digitised print fiction and nonfiction, manuscripts,
READING MATERIALS
Readers in the digital age