The IntraText Digital Library: XML-Driven Online Library Based on High Accessibility, Lexical Hypertextualization and Scholarly Accuracy in Philological / Textual Notations

Abstract

The IntraText Digital Library born in 1999. At June 2002 it offers over 3000 full-text books and collections in 36 languages; the readers (over 5000 subscribed the News) access over 1 million pages per month. Six interface languages are available.

The core of the project is a XML-driven Digital Library Framework offering high accessibility and scholarly quality in text representation: multi-level footnotes, philological notations, distinction between the lexicon of the author and that of other sources in concordance, hyphenation, sorting, etc. It is based on a scalable, low-cost architecture intended to manage (with workflow control) publishing and archiving books and collections by local or remote users and serving thousands of readers.

ETML, a very accurate text-to-XML translation metalanguage, has been defined. It simplifies the text-to-XML process, provides tools for philological notations and gives automatic tools to create hypertexualized collections of archived works, e.g. opera omnia. ETML allows non-technically-skilled people to produce XML simply using any text-editor and e-mail, dramatically reducing times in manual processing: it takes about 30 minutes to produce an XML Bible from a Word file using ETML.

The main publishing method for the library is lexical hypertextualization on highly accessible HTML pages, both on-line and on CD. Words (all or selected from a custom list) are linked to the concordance, concordance is itself linked to the text trough full references. Lists (frequency, alphabetical) and statistics are also available.

Other publishing formats (MS Reader, XML TEI, etc.) will be available within the Library. Dublin Core metadata are about to be activated.