The new face of Gallica

Gallica, the on-line French national library, has been offering digitized books on-line long before Google Books did. It was astonishing to me what I could find there, but the site tended to be somewhat quirky. (At one point I was under the impression that the downloads were not available on the weekends.) And it was always entirely in French. Now they have a new, slick interface and an English version: I'm amazed. I had read some time back that they protested Google Books, and perhaps this overhaul is their way of getting a competitive edge. Whatever the reason: bravo!

Ancient libraries on-line

Renaissance Magazine has an interesting article in the December, 2007 (#58) issue on how ancient books are being digitized for on-line libraries. Normally books are scanned, but the photo-like images take up lots of file space. If converted to text, the files are smaller. An additional advantage, for the researcher, is that they can then be searched.

However, converting old books to text is challenging because of the irregularity of the printing. An interesting solution makes use of the garbled letters test given to an estimated 60 million internet users a day. By incorporating snippets of a scanned book into the tests—and feeding the “translations” back to the digital library—a digital text version of the book is created.