Internet Content

If the Internet is a conduit for and html a mark up language, then anything that can be marked up can be channeled through the Internet. That also means that any document or object that exists in one format that can be converted to a WWW mark up language can be a Web document. If it's a Web document or object, it can be indexed or cataloged using the various tool we now have available.

Types of Content

As is shown below, a very wide variety of material in many formats can now be shown on the Internet. These range from representations of historical and anthropological materials with general to subject specific contents through information with no physical analogs. F.W. Lancaster predicted once that we are headed for a paperless society. He has since recanted somewhat. Legacy documents not withstanding, there is movement toward creation of definitive documents in digital format. There are paper analogs to digital documents. There are other digital formats with less contact with "reality." What is the point? If we can think of it, we can represent it. Some "its" are better represented or manipulated as virtual objects than as "real" ones.

Check out sgi's Char Davies' "Éphémère" blurb describing a VR exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998. Or the description of her vision:

"Immersence Inc. was founded by Char Davies in 1998 for the purpose of pursuing artistic research in immersive virtual space." source: http://www.immersence.com/immersence_home.htm

The point here is not to promote VR, Immersence, or Char Davies, but to illustrate art without analog with the physical world. VR builds a reality analog with the mental world. We are developing very sophisticated interactive computing. And to slip in a small amount of my own opinion, VR may well become (to paraphrase Karl Marx) the new "opiate of the masses." We are already told that we must design for the "Nintendo generation." I suggest "we ain't seen nuthin' yet."

Take a look at the following for digital applications in a library environment:

Bernard J. Hurley, John Price-Wilkin, Merrilee Proffitt, Howard Besser The Making of America II Testbed Project: A Digital Library Service Model, Digital Library Federation, December 1999. Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub87/contents.html

Nicole Bouché, Digitization for Scholarly Use: The Boswell Papers Project at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Council of Library and Information resources, March 1999. Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub81-bouche/pub81text.html

Text

Anything in text can be converted to html and served up on the World Wide Web. Sometimes that not as easy as it sounds. If the native document or its surrogate is already in digital format (depending on the format), conversion to html is more or less straight forward. If it is not, it can be scanned and converted to a digital format using OCR [optical character recognition] software. Barring that since some documents are not appropriate for scanning, content can be rekeyed (at a price). Or the document can be retained as an image file -- what pdf does. Once the document is in digital format and html encoded, any number of cataloging strategies can be applied. Some of these are listed below.

Project Gutenberg (available at http://promo.net/pg/index.html) publishes books as "etexts" that are no longer in copyright.

There are thousands of collections of short stories on-line. For example, see Classic Short Stores at http://www.bnl.com/shorts/ or Fritz Lieber Short Stories (science fiction, single author) at http://www.lankhmar.demon.co.uk/frame/short.htm How does the Sisters in Crime (http://www.sistersincrime.org/stories.htm) differ ? Take a look at some of them.

Digitization may not be the panacea to library and archival problems. It too comes with its down side. Consider this conclusion:

"What we have found is that digitization often raises expectations of benefits, cost reductions, and efficiencies that can be illusory and, if not viewed realistically, have the potential to put at risk the collections and services libraries have provided for decades" Abby Smith, Why Digitize? Council of Library and Information resources. February 1999. Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80.html

Images

Works of art can be viewed on line. They can also be organized in useful ways. Take a look at World Wide Arts Resources list of countries and art styles at: http://artsresources.com/museums.html.

Here is a link to my favorite painting:
http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=46398+0+none

What do we see. This is a painting by the French Impressionist Auguste Renoir. It hangs at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. When I searched for this painting using the National Gallery's LASE by its name in French <<Jeune fille avec attatoir>> I was informed that the there was no entry for it. Cannot be, since I know that the painting is housed there. So I tried "Renoir". On the engine, the painting is entitled "A Girl with a Watering Can."

Was my failure to find this painting using its French name a searcher fault or a search engine fault. In a sense, it's both. Because the engine was created by an American museum perhaps I should have anticipated that it would be populated with English language terms and names and only in English. On the other hand, Renoir did not name his painting specifically and in English "A Girl with a Watering Can." Is there a deontological ethic, a rule that states that search engines must use the name and language of the creator of object described?

How can we catalog images (cartographers have the same problems): By name, by creator, by size, by provenance, by where it is found, by what it last fetched (or might fetch) at auction, and so on. We can catalog by description: "girl, young, blond hair, blue dress, red bow, green grass, brown dirt, flowers, watering can." We can describe color or grayscale patterns by pixels. Read the painting description at the National Gallery page for this picture. What additional information could be used to catalog this painting? The image of this painting? For a discussion of these issues, see Michael Ester, Digital Image Collections: Issues and Practice, CLIR, December 1996.

Sight and Sound

We are all now fully aware that the Web is much more than a conduit for "still" text and "still" images. If we are to catalog or index the Web, effective means must be used to manage these materials as well. For a sense of the range of materials available, take a look at William and Gayle Cook Music Library, Indiana University School of Music, Worldwide Internet Music Resources at http://www.music.indiana.edu/music_resources/musiclib3.html or The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/rha/rha.soureso.html

Music Libraries - take a look a the article by Paul F. Wells, The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University: Dcoumenting the Broad Range of American Vernacular Music. Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, June 1998, 54, 4. Available: http://popmusic.mtsu.edu/article.html

How does Schwann Publications (http://www.schwann.com/enter.html) or the Museum of Television and Radio at http://www.mtr.org/welcome.htm manage audio or visual records? What about Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble? How do the commercial houses categorize their audio and video collections?