From the Print Media to the Internet Part 5

"The work of 20 typesetters is now carried out by six qualified workers. There has also been a concentration of centres of production, thus placing enormous pressure on the small and medium-sized enterprises which are traditional sources of employment. [...] Computer science makes it possible for experts to become independent producers. Approximately 30 per cent of employees have set up independently and have been able to carve out part of the market."

Although on-line services create some new jobs, as directors of organizations of newspaper publishers often claim, the unions have also stated that the number of job creations is much lower than the number of dismissals.

Even if the Internet is a huge information tank, the press will always need journalists, as explained by Jean-Pierre Cloutier, editor of the Chroniques de Cyberie, in an article of WebdoMag of July 1998:

"Some people predicted the short-term disappearance of the traditional media and their creators. 'We won't need journalists any more when a good browser for News groups is available', Michael Hauben of Columbia University warned two years ago. 'The more people there are on-line, the more marginalized the professional information media will be.' This is rubbish.

The spirit of discovery and the taste for exploration and technical experimentation of those who were early in adopting the Internet (the ones that the sociologists of the Net call the early doers) are not shared by the second wave of users who now make up the largest part of this 'critical ma.s.s'.

And that is the challenge for the specialized press - to accompany the public in its discovery of the new medium and in its appropriation of cybers.p.a.ce, help people to a.n.a.lyze, facilitate their understanding, add value to raw information."

Moreover, with the Internet, it is possible to read on-line t.i.tles which are difficult to find in newsstands, like the Algerian daily newspaper El Watan, on-line since October 1997. When interviewed by the French daily newspaper Le Monde of March 23, 1998, Redha Belkhat, chief editor, told: "For the Algerian diaspora, to find in a newsstand of London, New York, or Ottawa an issue of El Watan less than a week old is an achievement. Now the newspaper is here at 6 AM, and at noon it is on the Internet."

Forbidden newspapers can also continue on-line thanks to the Internet, such as the independent Algerian daily La Nation (The Nation). Because it was denouncing the violation of human rights in Algeria, it had to stop its activities in December 1996. One year later, a special issue was available on the site of Reporters sans frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) for the first anniversary of its disappearance. Malti Djallan, who is at the origin of this Reporters sans frontieres initiative, explained: "By putting La Nation on-line, our goal was to say: it no longer makes sense to censor the newspapers in Algeria, because thanks to the Internet people can retrieve the articles, print them, and spread them out around."

Nouvelles du bled (News of the Village) is an electronic newspaper created in December 1997 by Christian Debraisne, who is French, and Mohamed Zaoui, an Algerian journalist in exile. The team includes about twelve persons who meet on Thursday evenings in a Parisian cafe. When interviewed in Le Monde of March 23, 1998, Christian Debraisne, who is responsible for the composition, explained:

"With the Internet, we found a s.p.a.ce for free expression and, as a bonus, there were no printing and distribution problems. I get all the articles and I put them on-line during the night from my house."

The press review is prepared using the newspapers of Algiers, Algeria. In the same article, Mohamed Zaoui explained:

"The editorial staff of El Watan, for example, sends us articles which cannot be published there. It is a way to confound censorship. I wanted to be useful and I thought that my role as a journalist was to seize the opportunity the Internet was offering to air opinions other than the Algerian government's and the fundamentalists'."

The press now has to confront all the Internet's resources:

- instant access to many information servers;

- speed in information dissemination;

- development of main photographic archives;

- gigantic doc.u.mentation capacity (geographical maps, biographical notes, official texts, political and economic doc.u.ments, audiovisual and video doc.u.ments, etc.) going from the general to the specialized and vice versa;

- links to all these information sources and other articles on the same topic; and

- archives equipped with a search engine allowing the retrieval of articles by date, author, t.i.tle, subject, etc.

Because of these resources, the Internet brings in-depth information that no other media could bring so easily. Daily information is supported by a whole encyclopedia which helps to understand it.

Even if audiovisual and video techniques are more and more present in the on-line press, the most important thing is still its content, as Jean-Pierre Cloutier, the editor of the Chroniques de Cyberie, reminded us in his e-mail of June 8, 1998:

"For the Chroniques de Cyberie, we could launch and maintain a formula because of the relatively low entry costs in this medium. However, everything will depend on the scope of the phenomenon called media 'convergence' and a possible rise of production costs if we need to offer audio and video products to stay compet.i.tive. If that is the case, we will have to think over strategic partnerships, a little like the one linking us to the group Ringier which permitted the re-launching of the Chroniques after six months of inactivity. But whatever the degree of convergence is, I think there will always be room for written work, and also for in-depth a.n.a.lysis on the main questions."

6. LIBRARIES ON THE WEB

[In this chapter:]

[6.1. European and World Directories for Libraries / 6.2. The Internet in Libraries]

This chapter focuses on traditional libraries, with librarians, walls, books and periodicals lined up on shelves, and tables and chairs for the readers. The next chapter will focus on digital libraries.

6.1. European and World Directories for Libraries

The first library website was that of the Helsinki City Library, Finland, which opened in February 1994.

A trilingual English-French-German site, Gabriel (acronym for Gateway and Bridge to Europe's National Libraries) is the World Wide Web service for Europe's National Libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

"Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naude, whose Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest theoretical works about libraries in any European language and provides a blueprint for the great modern research library. The name Gabriel is common to many European languages and is derived from the Old Testament, where Gabriel appears as one of the archangels or heavenly messengers. He also appears in a similar role in the New Testament and the Qu'ran."

There are currently 38 national libraries from the member states of the Council of Europe partic.i.p.ating in CENL and Gabriel (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, (Former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, Malta, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vatican City).

During the 1994 Oslo meeting of the Conference of European National Libraries, it was suggested that national libraries should have an electronic noticeboard available to one another as a means of keeping up-to-date with current activities. An ad hoc meeting was held in The Hague, Netherlands, on March 27, 1995, at which representatives of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, British Library and Helsinki University Library met to discuss the proposed CENL WWW. Objectives were set out at the meeting and an action schedule agreed. These three libraries set up the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries agreed to partic.i.p.ate in the pilot project: Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany), the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the Biblioteka Narodowa (Poland). Working together, these libraries created a functional pilot service based on entries describing their own services and collections between March and September 1995.

The pilot service was endorsed by the CENL annual meeting at Bern in Switzerland in September 1995 and launched on the Internet. The service was then mounted and maintained in London by British Library Network Services and was mirrored in The Hague, Netherlands, and Helsinki, Finland.

A second stage in the project was initiated on behalf of CENL in October 1995.

The project was hosted by the British Library in London. In November 1995, national libraries that had not partic.i.p.ated in the Gabriel pilot project were invited to submit their entries. Using the pilot as a basis, this development project aimed to achieve comprehensive coverage of European national libraries within Gabriel. During the life of the project, the numbers of CENL member libraries with their own WWW servers had increased quite rapidly. Every partic.i.p.ating library a.s.signed staff members to act as contact persons for Gabriel. This project ended in September 1996. As content and publicity built up, and the numbers of linking sites expanded, measurable usage of the Gabriel service had increased rapidly.

During the CENL meeting in September 1996 in Lisbon, the CENL members decided that Gabriel should be launched as an official service of CENL on behalf of Europe's national libraries on January 1, 1997. The editorial maintenance of Gabriel was taken over by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. The site is now mirrored from the websites of five national libraries in The Hague (The Netherlands), London (United Kingdom), Helsinki (Finland), Frankfort (Germany), and Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Updated in December 11, 1998, the introduction of Internet and the Library Sphere: Further progress for European Libraries specifies:

"Public libraries have now established a presence on the Web which compares well with the networked services which have been available for some time from academic libraries and national libraries. Services include sophisticated catalogue access for their users as well as links to other items of interest (local services, general reference, distance education, external resources).

While it is difficult to keep track of developments, there are now probably some 1,000 public libraries from at least 26 European countries on the Web. This trend can be expected to continue as most countries now have firm plans in support of libraries in the Information Society.

There is, of course, a vast amount of networked information on libraries, initially from North American sources but now increasingly from Europe and the rest of the world. Not only have sites been created for most of our 99 EU projects, but the eLib projects in the UK and some of the Autoroutes de l'Information [information highways] projects in France have contributed significantly. And last but not least, concerted efforts in the area of public libraries, have added a wealth of accessible resources in a wide variety of languages."

As for the 1,000 public libraries in 26 European countries, the leaders are Finland (247), Sweden (132), the United Kingdom (112), Denmark (107), Germany (102), the Netherlands (72), Lithuania (51), Spain (56), and Norway (45).

Newcomers are the Czech Republic (29) and Portugal (3). Russia maintains on the Web a list of public reference libraries with 26 names. Sites vary significantly between rudimentary information on addresses and opening hours to full access to OPACs (on-line public access catalogs) and/or to a variety of local and external services.

Compiled by Sheila and Robert Harden, Public Libraries of Europe is a country-by-country listing of European public libraries on the Web.

I'm Europe, the site of the European Union, has a section General Library Resources on the Web, with the following contents: library indexes; general library resources; public library information; individual public libraries; publishers and the book trade; other EU projects; and other sites of interest.

Library and Related Resources is maintained by Ian Tilsed on the site of the Library and Information Service of the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. It comprises: library information servers; library catalogues; library and information science resources; library and related organizations; library projects, reports, bibliographies and doc.u.mentation; library related e-mail lists and e-journals; LIS (library and information science) training & professional development; museums; publishers and newspapers; scholarly societies; indexes and bibliographic information sources; frequently asked questions (FAQ) files; and web indexes and lists.

The Library of Congress's section Library and Information Science Resources provides links to: general resources; national libraries; state libraries; school library resources; library home pages; on-line catalogs; research and reference; technical services; special collections; digital libraries; professional organizations; library and information science schools; professional journals; library vendors; and library conferences.

Compiled by the Berkeley Digital Library (California, USA), LibWeb: Library Servers via WWW currently lists 2,500 web pages from libraries over 70 countries (as of December 10, 1998), with a daily update. The search is available by location, library type or library name.

6.2. The Internet in Libraries

The Libraries Programme of the European Union "aims to help increase the ready availability of library resources across Europe and to facilitate their interconnection with the information and communications infrastructure. Its two main orientations will be the development of advanced systems to facilitate user access to library resources, and the interconnection of libraries with other libraries and the developing "information highway". Validation tests will be accompanied by measures to promote standards, disseminate results and raise the awareness of library staff about the possibilities afforded by telematics systems."