Austrian Literature Online (ALO) is an Austrian digitization project by the University Library of Innsbruck, the University Library of Graz and the University of Linz.
Austria, officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in Central Europe comprising 9 federated states. Its capital, largest city and one of nine states is Vienna. Austria has an area of 83,879 km2 (32,386 sq mi), a population of nearly 9 million people and a nominal GDP of $477 billion. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The terrain is highly mountainous, lying within the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 m (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,798 m (12,461 ft). The majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, and German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other regional languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, and Slovene.
Digitization, less commonly digitalization, is the process of converting information into a digital format, in which the information is organized into bits. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or signal by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitate computer processing and other operations, but, strictly speaking, digitizing simply means the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format; the decimal or any other number system that can be used instead.
ALO is, together with Project ANNO, by the Austrian National Library, the largest Austrian project of its type. In August 2004, the 4,000th title was digitized. The majority of items are digital facsimiles.
The Austrian National Library is the largest library in Austria, with more than 12 million items in its various collections. The library is located in the Neue Burg Wing of the Hofburg in center of Vienna. Since 2005, some of the collections have been relocated within the baroque structure of the Palais Mollard-Clary. Founded by the Habsburgs, the library was originally called the Imperial Court Library ; the change to the current name occurred in 1920. The library complex includes four museums, as well as multiple special collections and archives.
A facsimile is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in scale, color, condition, and other material qualities. For books and manuscripts, this also entails a complete copy of all pages; hence, an incomplete copy is a "partial facsimile". Facsimiles are sometimes used by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to otherwise, and by museums and archives for media preservation and conservation. Many are sold commercially, often accompanied by a volume of commentary. They may be produced in limited editions, typically of 500–2,000 copies, and cost the equivalent of a few thousand United States dollars. The term "fax" is a shortened form of "facsimile" though most faxes are not reproductions of the quality expected in a true facsimile.
The focus is on Austrian literature and women's literature, but numerous digital copies of documents from other areas (such as old documents in Tirolensia Latina) have also been made available online.
ALO has been conceived as a participatory project that, for comparatively low prices, offers digitization and permanent access to works in the public domain and also, where rights are available, to copyright-protected materials.
The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, and under what conditions, this original work may be used by others. This is usually only for a limited time. Copyright is one of two types of intellectual property rights, the other is industrial property rights. The exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright on ideas is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves.
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions can be used in library science, and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions. In journalism, a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document written by such a person.
Electronic publishing includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes an editorial aspect, that consists of editing books, journals or magazines that are mostly destined to be read on a screen.
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.
An online encyclopedia, also called a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet, such as Wikipedia. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the 1994 Interpedia proposal; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and was overtaken by a key branch of old printed encyclopedias.
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) is a research center at the University of California, Irvine. The TLG was founded in 1972 by Marianne McDonald with the goal to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from antiquity to the present era. Since 1972, the TLG has collected and digitized most surviving literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, and beyond. Theodore Brunner (1934-2007) directed the project from 1972 until his retirement from the University of California in 1998. Maria Pantelia, also a classics professor at UC Irvine, succeeded Theodore Brunner in 1998, and has been directing the TLG since. TLG's name is shared with its online database, the full title of which is Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature.
The University of Michigan Library is the university library system of the University of Michigan, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States.
Making of America (MoA) is a collaborative effort by Cornell University and the University of Michigan to digitize and make available a collection of primary sources relating to the development of U.S infrastructure. The Making of America collection at Cornell contains close to a million pages from more than 250 monographs and almost 1000 serials. The University of Michigan Library holds almost 13,000 volumes containing nearly four million pages of e-text.
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors, through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners, through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.
Grey literature are materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports, working papers, government documents, white papers and evaluations. Organizations that produce grey literature include government departments and agencies, civil society or non-governmental organisations, academic centres and departments, and private companies and consultants.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing tens of thousands of titles and more than 100,000 volumes.
The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is an online, public collection of documents and media about the history and culture of the state of Georgia, United States. The collection includes more than a million digitized objects from more than 200 Georgia-related collections. The DLG connects users to content from 65 libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other institutions, as well as 100 agencies of state government. It can be searched or browsed through the Digital Library of Georgia website.
The Slovenská národná knižnica is a modern scientific, cultural, information and educational institution that serves all citizens of Slovakia and users from abroad. Slovak National Library is conservation and depositary library of Slovakia. SNL preferably collects, professionally processes, stores, protects and makes accessible domestic and foreign Slavic documents. Funds and collections of the Slovak National Library contain 4.9 million library items, 1.7 million archive documents and thousands of museum units.
A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, or other digital media formats. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection.
D-Scribe Digital Publishing is an open access electronic publishing program of the University Library System (ULS) of the University of Pittsburgh. It comprises over 100 thematic collections that together contain over 100,000 digital objects. This content, most of which is available through open access, includes both digitized versions of materials from the collections of the University of Pittsburgh and other local institutions as well as original 'born-electronic' content actively contributed by scholars worldwide. D-Scribe includes such items as photographs, maps, books, journal articles, dissertations, government documents, and technical reports, along with over 745 previously out-of-print titles published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The digital publishing efforts of the University Library System began in 1998 and have won praise for their innovation from the leadership at the Association of Research Libraries and peer institutions.
Tamil Heritage Foundation (THF) is a non-profit organization that collaborates with the British Library to collect, preserve and digitize documents of Tamil cultural heritage. Among activities around the world, the project activities are centered primarily in India, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and South Korea.
Qatar National Library (QNL) is a non-profit organization under the umbrella of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. The plans for the new national library were announced by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, on 19 November 2012, during a ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Dar Al Kutub Library, in Doha, Qatar, one of the first public libraries in the Persian Gulf region, which had until then been regarded as the national library of Qatar.
The Cambridge Digital Library is a project operated by the Cambridge University Library designed to make items from the unique and distinctive collections of Cambridge University Library available online. The project was initially funded by a donation of £1.5 million GBP from Dr. Leonard Polonsky, with the purpose of developing the technical infrastructure and producing an initial batch of online content. The first step of the project, known as the Foundations Project, ran from mid-2010 to early 2014, and was themed around two main strands, Faith and Science.
The Darlington Collection is extensive collection of rare documents, maps, and other historical material focusing on early American history, particularly that of Western Pennsylvania. The original material is housed by the Archives Services Center (ASC) of the library of the University of Pittsburgh with digitized material available at the Darlington Digital Library. The collection was inherited by Darlington's daughters Mary O'Hara Darlington and Edith Darlington. The donation of the collection was first given to the University of Pittsburgh in 1918. The rest of the collection was donated in 1925.
ETH Library is the largest public scientific and technical library in Switzerland. It serves as a central university library for ETH Zurich and a national centre for scientific and technical information. Besides providing information for members of ETH Zurich, it also offers resources for the interested public and companies from research and development. Its main focuses are electronic information services for university members and the development of innovative services.