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Abstract

The author holds a chair in Humanities Computer Science at the University of Cologne. For a number of years, he has been responsible for digitization projects, either as project director or as the person responsible for the technology being employed on the projects. The "Duderstadt project" (http://www.archive.geschichte.mpg.de/duderstadt/dud-e.htm) is one such project. It is one of the early large-scale manuscript servers, finished at the end of 1998, with approximately 80,000 high resolution documents representing the holdings of a city archive before the year 1600. The digital library of the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt (http://www.mpier.uni-frankfurt.de/dlib) is another project on which the author has worked, with currently approximately 900,000 pages. The author is currently project director of the project "Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Colonensis" (CEEC), which has just started and will ultimately consist of approximately 130,000 very high resolution color pages representing the complete holdings of the manuscript library of a medieval cathedral. It is being designed in close cooperation with the user community of such material. The project site (http://www.ceec.uni-koeln.de), while not yet officially opened, currently holds about 5,000 pages and is growing by 100 - 150 pages per day. Parallel to the CEEC model project, a conceptual project, the "Codex Electronicus Colonensis" (CEC), is at work on the definition of an abstract model for the representation of medieval codices in digital form. The following paper has grown out of the design considerations for the mentioned CEC project. The paper reflects a growing concern of the author's that some of the recent advances in digital (research) libraries are being diluted because it is not clear whether the advances really reach the audience for whom the projects would be most useful. Many, if not most, digitization projects have aimed at existing collections as individual servers. A digital library, however, should be more than a digitized one. It should be built according to principles that are not necessarily the same as those employed for paper collections, and it should be evaluated according to different measures which are not yet totally clear. The paper takes the form of six theses on various aspects of the ongoing transition to digital libraries. These theses have been presented at a forum on the German "retrodigitization" program. The program aims at the systematic conversion of library resources into digital form, concentrates for a number of reasons on material primarily of interest to the Humanities, and is funded by the German research council. As such this program is directly aimed at improving the overall infrastructure of academic research; other users of libraries are of interest, but are not central to the program.

Content

Theses: 1. Who should be addressed by digital libraries? How shall we measure whether we have reached the desired audience? Thesis: The primary audience for a digital library is neither the leading specialist in the respective field, nor the freshman, but the advanced student or young researcher and the "almost specialist". The primary topic of digitization projects should not be the absolute top range of the "treasures" of a collection, but those materials that we always have wanted to promote if they were just marginally more important. Whether we effectively serve them to the appropriate community of serious users can only be measured according to criteria that have yet to be developed. 2. The appropriate size of digital libraries and their access tools Thesis: Digital collections need a critical, minimal size to make their access worthwhile. In the end, users want to access information, not metadata or gimmicks. 3. The quality of digital objects Thesis: If digital library resources are to be integrated into the daily work of the research community, they must appear on the screen of the researcher in a quality that is useful in actual work. 4. The granularity / modularity of digital repositories Thesis: While digital libraries are self-contained bodies of information, they are not the basic unit that most users want to access. Users are, as a rule, more interested in the individual objects in the library and need a straightforward way to access them. 5. Digital collections as integrated reference systems Thesis: Traditional libraries support their collections with reference material. Digital collections need to find appropriate models to replicate this functionality. 6. Library and teaching Thesis: The use of multimedia in teaching is as much of a current buzzword as the creation of digital collections. It is obvious that they should be connected. A clear-cut separation of the two approaches is nevertheless necessary.

Type

a