Prints of the 17th Century in a distributed digital library system

Abstract

In recent years, library systems have evolved from simple electronic catalogues to extensive document sources. Progress in storage media, database and wide area networking technologies allow access to documents in their original form. Besides “modern” documents, which are often created and distributed in electronic exchange formats, huge amounts of ancient, paper based literature which are valuable for scientific research exist. In the long-term project VD17 1 all prints of the 17th Century published in the German-speaking area will be registered, scanned and stored in a distributed digital library system. Historians, literary scholars, and other scientists in the field of humanities can later access catalogue data of the prints together with scanned key-pages via Internet. About 250,000 titles with more than a million pixel images will be held on magnetic hard disc devices and optical storage media in jukeboxes.

This paper gives an overview of the project's goals. It describes the system architecture and dataflow of the enhanced OMNIS digital library system which is used as technological basis for the project. The solution is based on a previous pilot project.