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C00002 00002 ā02-Oct-83 1618 Janet.Asbury@CMU-CS-A Electronic Library
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ā02-Oct-83 1618 Janet.Asbury@CMU-CS-A Electronic Library
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From: Jan.Asbury <Janet.Asbury@CMU-CS-A>
To: JMC@SU-AI
Subject: Electronic Library
CC: Janet.Asbury@CMU-CS-A
Message-Id: <02Oct83.191101.JA61@CMU-CS-A>
Dear Dr. McCarthy,
I just checked my electronic mail and discovered that the message I sent
you on Friday never reached you because I mistakenly addressed it to JCM,
not JMC. I am so sorry for the error. Professor Reddy had said he was
hoping to receive a revised version of the proposal from you by tomorrow
so he can send it on. As you will see, there are only minor changes between
this version and the first version we sent you. The word 'Physical' in the
first line has been changed to 'conventional', some section headings have
been changed to subsections, and Section 3.3 reads 'Technical Issues' instead
of 'Technical Problems'. I am sending an MSS file and a DOC file. Please
make any revisions on the MSS file.
Jan Asbury
Secretary to Professor Reddy
@device(dover)
@make(article)
@heading(A PILOT PROJECT IN ELECTRONIC LIBRARIES)
@center(J. McCarthy, M. Griffith, R. Reddy))
@section(SUMMARY)
@section(PROBLEM)
An Electronic Library, as the name suggests, is the electronic
equivalent of a conventional library. It is expected that when a
system capable of fulfilling all the functions of a real library
is developed, it can provide many new functions that are currently
unavailable: instantaneous access from anyone's home or office,
multiple access by many people so that a book is never out, reduced
cost, language translation aids, the ability to search text and to
make excerpts and indexes and the integration of information retrieval
and more conventional reading.
Constructing an operational Electronic Library poses a number of
technical, social and legal problems at present. The purpose of the
Pilot Project is to bypass many of these problems for now, and
concentrate on a few core problems which do not require any new
technical breakthroughs. The key problems to be studied will
involve the questions of how to acquire, represent, transmit, and
present Nineteenth Century French Literature. By selecting NCFL,
we finesse the issue of copyright, the problems of formulas and
drawings, and increase the availability of French Literature.
@section(BACKGROUND AND NEED)
For some time it has been cost-effective to put an entire
national library into a computer file and make all its resources
available to anyone in the country with a computer terminal. There
is no need to argue that all printed paper will be abolished, but
many people would get rid of ninety percent of their
books and magazines if they could access electronically from a
terminal at home.
It is now possible to get a gigabyte disk module for
under $20,000. If we count a book as 500,000 bytes, then this
module can store 2000 books. The space occupied by the module
would store about 300 books on shelves. The cost comes to $10 per
book. Recent word information compression would give another factor
of four in storage density, reducing the cost to approximately
$2.50 per book and reducing the storage volume to @i(one twenty-fourth)
of that required to store books on shelves.
Books cost much more these days and so does the space required to store
them, although the cost of cataloging the books is apparently larger
than either.
Recently IBM (3380) announced disk files storing 2.52 gigabytes per
unit which would store 20,000 compressed books in the space taken
by 300 on shelves. The U.S. Library of Congress would then require between
1000 and 2000 such disk units.
Digital videodisks storing much more are predicted for
the reasonably near future, but the project is practical with technology
now in hand. It is time to begin.
Consider the following system. In addition to existing paper
libraries, there would exist one or more computerized libraries containing
everything that has ever been published, i.e. a computerized version
of the Bibliotheque Nationale. This library would be accessible
over the telephone network from any computer terminal in the country.
A reader could browse through the library catalog and various
bibliographies just as though he were physically present. He could read
any book by calling it page by page onto his terminal's screen or he
could have it transmitted to a local printer.
Printers with fixed fonts are now available for a few hundred dollars,
and laser printers that print arbitrary fonts now cost about
$10,000, but will be cheaper
Most office workers would have terminals on their desks, and many
people would have them at home. At present a good enough terminal
costs about $500, and high quality terminals should cost about
$1,000 if manufactured in moderate quantity. Most offices can afford
a high quality printer.
Of course, yet better terminals may eventually be available. We can
imagine a pocket terminal consisting of a rolled up plastic screen
with a 1024 by 1024 array of liquid crystal dots accompanied by
another rolled up pressure sensitive keyboard and a pocket computer
with enough memory to store a book. Suppose that it has a modular
jack that can plug into any telephone so that the user can call the
library, scan it for a while and then reload his book memory. This
would be nicer than the technology now available, but the available
technology is good enough to justify a start.
>From the user's point of view, the advantages of the computerized
library are the following:
@begin(enumerate)
All books, magazines and newspapers are available.
Anything can be obtained in a few seconds.
Nothing is ever out.
The library is open 24 hours a day 365.2425 days a year.
@end(enumerate)
Many paper libraries would be found unnecessary. In particular,
university libraries could carry out their functions with much less
money and manpower, since their users would switch to the electronic
library for much of their work.
The establishment of such a system involves many problems and will take
some years, but we will mention some facilities that can and should be
started right away. Moreover, people who don't have terminals at home now
or on their desks or don't use them at all may be difficult to convince
of the advantages of such a library.
@subsection(Problems)
@begin(itemize)
It is expensive to convert the books to computer readable form. Equipment
for reading special type fonts is available and reliable. The recent
Kurzweil equipment reads arbitrary fonts with training but is reported
to rely to a substantial degree on a blind person's ability to know when
something was garbled and try again and on his ability to understand imperfectly
read material. The lowest error rates are apparently those obtained
by the Information International Grafix I system. This machine is very
expensive, mainly because it uses obsolete computer hardware, but
the company would update it if the market existed. Even if much of
the material had to be retyped by hand, the project would be worth what
it would cost.
Of course, much new material is generated in computer-readable form,
but many forms are used, and as yet no-one has developed a system
for putting all this material into a common form.
The copyright law requires permission to put copyrighted material into
computer form. In my opinion, copyrights should be respected and
suitable financial arrangements based on readership should be negotiated.
Once a computerized library exists, it will be so much more accessible than
other libraries that authors and publishers will find it to their
advantage to negotiate suitable deals.
The best arrangement might be that the copyright owner could set whatever
price he pleased for reading his material. The reader could decide whether
or not to pay it.
There is a problem of unauthorized copying. The problem exists whether a
national library exists or not, and the temptations will increase as
copying machines get more convenient and cheaper and when a general
purpose machine for reading documents from paper to computer files
becomes available.
At present an author gets ten to twenty percent of the retail price
of his books, except that he gets nothing for unsold books and less
for mass market paperbacks. An electronic publishing system could
afford to give the author eighty percent of the price paid by the
readers, because there would be no physical production or distribution
costs. This would permit increased income for authors and reduced
prices for the readers. Presumably there is some price elasticity for
reading that would produce more reading with reduced prices and greater
convenience. This would greatly reduce the temptation to copy illegally,
since the reader would find it less burdensome to pay the writer his due.
It is likely that the amount of illegal copying would be low enough
so that the system would survive. If not, we will eventually have
to go to a system where reading is essentially free and writers are
paid according to a formula by the Government. This would have many
disadvantages, since no formula could take fully into account the
fact that different writers have different abilities and put different
amounts of work into books of different kinds. Of course,
the present system doesn't take this into account very well either,
but there are some works now that charge very high prices, i.e.
newsletters. These could still operate outside the standard system.
@end(itemize)
@subsection(Getting Started)
Already there exist numerous databases available by telephone.
Some of them contain bibliographic
information, i.e. abstracts and references, but others contain the
texts of the material. Some of them are subsidized by government
grants, e.g. many of the medical databases, and others, e.g. the
legal databases and the "New York Times" Databank, are profit making
businesses. The charges for using them range from $25 to $200 per
hour except for subsidized customers.
One important step could be taken by the Federal Government. It
is required by the Freedom of Information Act and other laws to
make very large amounts of information available to the public.
This information would be much more conveniently available
if it were in a database accessible from anywhere in the country.
This especially includes the Federal Register where all new laws,
regulations, announcements of hearings and requests for comments
are published.
@subsection(Technical Issues)
While it is easy to compute the costs of the storage media, which
are already cheaper than paper, it is harder to calculate the
costs of the computers. This is because present systems have not
really been optimized for handling very large numbers of users.
It will also be necessary to optimize telephone access. For this
there are many possibilities.
A daytime cross-country call costs 54 cents for one minute.
In a minute 36,000 bytes can be transmitted at 4800 bits/second.
This means from $7.50 to $15.00 to transmit a book uncompressed
or from $1.87 to $3.75 with a compression of 4. We can imagine a
terminal that could store a minute's worth of text and could decompress
it for reading. These costs are unpleasantly high, but they can be
reduced in various ways. First, technology permits substantially
lower long distance transmission costs. Indeed the one minute
transcontinental charge late at night is 16 cents making our
compressed book cost from $.56 to $1.12 if transmitted all at once.
This is probably less than the cost of a trip to a library if one's time
is worth much. The independent long distance telephone companies are
often 40 percent below AT&T, which brings our optimistic number down to
33 cents, which is reminiscent of the days when pocket books were a
quarter.
We can suppose that the terminal would remember the telephone number and
catalog number and automatically phone for another minute's transmission when the
reader is close to the end of what it has in storage. These costs
are even less attractive when browsing is wanted. A solution for that
is to use the European telephone charging system which allows calls
as short as 4 seconds. Current networks keep the cost for maintaining
a connection down by time-sharing lines, but this doesn't reduce the cost
of straight data transmission.
An obvious possible saving is to have local libraries with frequently
consulted books and magazines. With optical fibers and other new means of
transmission, the transmission costs can be brought down to the
point that local libraries will be unnecessary.
@subsection(French Electronic Library)
The time is ripe for it to be socially worthwhile and economically
feasible to put the world literature in the French language into
computer form and make it available world wide.
Image the following system. The French language literature is put
into computer form, either by optical character recognition machines
or by keyboarding in low wage countries. A central computer library
in France keeps this literature on the equivalent of about 1000 IBM
3380 disk files. Three large bandwidth satellites are put up
to provide worldwide transmission facilities. Reading rooms with
suitable terminals are located in every place where there is
sufficient interest. A reader can call up any book or other document
from any terminal. When he does so, the first two pages are
transmitted via the satellite to the reading room computer and the first
page is displayed on his terminal. Perhaps the library catalog and
other currently popular documents are kept in local file.
@section(CURRENT STATUS)
<Mike Griffith to provide>
@section(PLAN FOR RESEARCH)
We propose to undertake the following pilot project.
@begin(enumerate)
A few RA81 disks are acquired from Digital Equipment Corporation and
attached to a VAX computer. This is currently the most cost-effective
disk file available.
A request for proposals for a few hundred thousand dollars worth of
book input is sent both to keyboarding companies and those that do
optical character recognition. In addition existing computerized
text is solicited from those who have it for experimental use.
The initial reading list is taken from the public domain literature.
About 20 telephone lines are attached to the VAX, so that the library
is available from existing terminals and micro-computers in the Paris
area.
@begin(multiple)
The necessary programs are written and installed.
At this point a technical demonstration is feasible. An attempt
is made to determine what is most attractive to the users of the
library within the budget available.
@end(multiple)
An experimental terminal cluster is installed in a reading room in the
Paris area. It should be a place that is open for a large number of hours.
@end(enumerate)
If the results are encouraging, the second phase includes:
@begin(enumerate)
Giving the computerized library its own computer.
More books.
Obtaining the co-operation of publishers of current books, magazines
and newspapers for an expanded program. An experimental financial
arrangement should be adopted.
Design of a reading terminal that can be used in connection with the
French telephone system's electronic yellow pages.
An experimental reading room in an underdeveloped country using
existing satellite transmission channnels.
Developing an optical character recognition system optimized toward
reading books.
@end(enumerate)
The pilot project is intended to lead to a demonstration by
the end of 1984 with several thousand books on line.
@begin(enumerate)
EQUIPMENT PLAN - We expect to start with a VAX with a gigabyte of
memory as the EL Machine located at CMIRH in Paris. This machine
will have at least 32 lines permitting anyone in the Paris region
with a terminal, personal computer or a Minitel to be able to use it.
By 1985 we hope to extend the service throughout France using the
CMIRH network.
ACQUISITON - There are already several thousand books available at
"----- Le Langru Francais" at Nancy. We hope to acquire these.
In addition we hope to acquire a similar collection from Britain and
the USA. Also we will have about 1000 books manually entered in Third
World countries. This is expected to be quite inexpensive, about 2000
FFr per book.
@end(enumerate)
All these different books will probably come in different formats.
We will develop format conversion programs to put them in CMIRH
standard format.
@i(Representation.) Information on the disk will be stored in a compact form with
frequently occurring words coded and formatting information bracketed
approximately.
Terminals and personal computers with local processing capability will
receive a decoding program followed by coded text which is expected to
also reduce the transmission time and cost. Dumb terminals will receive
fully decoded text. Decoding time should be less than 1 second per
10 words in sequence.
@i(Transmission.) Initially only serial line transmission will be considered. VAX will
support up to 19.2 kiloband transmission. Terminals and personal
computers with local processing will be able to correct transmission
error using Kermit-like programs. They can also accept data at much
higher rates for later presentation at user specified rates.
@i(Presentation.) It will be possible to access information from the on-line library
from almost all commmonly available terminals and personal computers.
However, from an ergonomic (human factors) point of view, high
resolution bit-mapped displays (equivalent in resolution to the FAX
standard) with a powerful personal computer with at least 2 megabytes
of memory would be highly desirable. Low cost versions (<$1000)
of such terminals should be available by the end of the decade.
It is expected to take at least that long to acquire and represent
a substantial collection of books, reports and newspapers in electronic
form.
@i(Selection.) <What books will be on-line in the first year. Mike Griffiths to
approach Academe Francais.>
A PILOT PROJECT IN ELECTRONIC LIBRARIES
J. McCarthy, M. Griffith, R. Reddy
)
1. SUMMARY
2. PROBLEM
An Electronic Library, as the name suggests, is the electronic equivalent of
a conventional library. It is expected that when a system capable of
fulfilling all the functions of a real library is developed, it can provide
many new functions that are currently unavailable: instantaneous access,
multiple access, reduced cost, and language translation aids.
Constructing an operational Electronic Library poses a number of technical,
social and legal problems at present. The purpose of the Pilot Project is to
bypass many of these problems for now, and concentrate on a few core problems
which do not require any new technical breakthroughs. The key problems to be
studied will involve the questions of how to acquire, represent, transmit, and
present Nineteenth Century French Literature. By selecting NCFL, we finesse
the issue of copyright, the problems of formulas and drawings, and ensure
widespread availability of French Literature.
3. BACKGROUND AND NEED
For some time it has been cost-effective to put the entire Library of
Congress into a computer file and make all its resources available to anyone in
the country with a computer terminal. There is no need to argue that all
printed paper will be abolished, but I would certainly get rid of ninety
percent of my books and magazines if I could access it from my terminal at
home.
It is now possible to get a gigabyte disk module for under $20,000. If we
count a book as 500,000 bytes, then this module can store 2000 books. The
space occupied by the module would store about 300 books on shelves. The cost
comes to $10 per book. Recent word information compression would give another
factor of four in storage density, reducing the cost to approximately $2.50 per
book and reducing the storage volume to one twenty-fourth of that required to
store books on shelves.
Books cost much more these days and so does the space required to store them,
although the cost of cataloging the books is apparently larger than either.
Recently IBM (3380) announced disk files storing 2.52 gigabytes per unit
which would store 20,000 compressed books in the space taken by 300 on shelves.
The Library of Congress would then require between 1000 and 2000 such disk
units.
Digital videodisks storing much more are predicted for the reasonably near
future, but the project is practical with technology now in hand. It is time
to begin.
Consider the following system. In addition to existing paper libraries,
there would exist one or more computerized libraries containing everything that
has ever been published, i.e. a computerized version of the Library of
Congress. This library would be accessible over the telephone network from any
computer terminal in the country. A reader could browse through the library
catalog and various bibliographies just as though he were physically present.
He could read any book by calling it page by page onto his terminal's screen or
he could have it transmitted to a local printer. At present, there are a
number of laser printers that print arbitrary fonts for less than $10,000, but
we can envisage cheaper printers in the future.
Most office workers would have terminals on their desks, and many people
would have them at home. At present a good enough terminal costs about $800,
and high quality terminals should cost about $2,000 if manufactured in moderate
quantity. Most offices can afford a high quality printer.
Of course, yet better terminals may eventually be available. We can imagine
a pocket terminal consisting of a rolled up plastic screen with a 1024 by 1024
array of liquid crystal dots accompanied by another rolled up pressure
sensitive keyboard and a pocket computer with enough memory to store a book.
Suppose that it has a modular jack that can plug into any telephone so that the
user can call the library, scan it for a while and then reload his book memory.
This would be nicer than the technology now available, but the available
technology is good enough to justify a start.
From the user's point of view, the advantages of the computerized library are
the following:
1. All books, magazines and newspapers are available.
2. Anything can be obtained in a few seconds.
3. Nothing is ever out.
4. The library is open 24 hours a day 365.2425 days a year.
Many paper libraries would be found unnecessary. In particular, university
libraries could carry out their functions with much less money and manpower,
since their users would switch to the electronic library for much of their
work.
The establishment of such a system involves many problems and will take some
years, but we will mention some facilities that can and should be started right
away. Moreover, people who don't have terminals at home now or on their desks
or don't use them at all may be difficult to convince of the advantages of such
a library.
3.1. Problems
- It is expensive to convert the books to computer readable form.
Equipment for reading special type fonts is available and reliable.
The recent Kurzweil equipment reads arbitrary fonts with training but
is reported to rely to a substantial degree on a blind person's
ability to know when something was garbled and try again and on his
ability to understand imperfectly read material. The lowest error
rates are apparently those obtained by the Information International
Grafix I system. This machine is very expensive, mainly because it
uses obsolete computer hardware, but the company would update it if
the market existed. Even if much of the material had to be retyped
by hand, the project would be worth what it would cost.
- Of course, much new material is generated in computer-readable form,
but many forms are used, and as yet no-one has developed a system for
putting all this material into a common form.
- The copyright law requires permission to put copyrighted material
into computer form. In my opinion, copyrights should be respected
and suitable financial arrangements based on readership should be
negotiated. Once a computerized library exists, it will be so much
more accessible than other libraries that authors and publishers will
find it to their advantage to negotiate suitable deals.
- The best arrangement might be that the copyright owner could set
whatever price he pleased for reading his material. The reader could
decide whether or not to pay it.
- There is a problem of unauthorized copying. The problem exists
whether a national library exists or not, and the temptations will
increase as copying machines get more convenient and cheaper and when
a general purpose machine for reading documents from paper to
computer files becomes available.
- At present an author gets ten to twenty percent of the retail price
of his books, except that he gets nothing for unsold books and less
for mass market paperbacks. An electronic publishing system could
afford to give the author eighty percent of the price paid by the
readers, because there would be no physical production or
distribution costs. This would permit increased income for authors
and reduced prices for the readers. Presumably there is some price
elasticity for reading that would produce more reading with reduced
prices and greater convenience. This would greatly reduce the
temptation to copy illegally, since the reader would find it less
burdensome to pay the writer his due.
- It is likely that the amount of illegal copying would be low enough
so that the system would survive. If not, we will eventually have to
go to a system where reading is essentially free and writers are paid
according to a formula by the Government. This would have many
disadvantages, since no formula could take fully into account the
fact that different writers have different abilities and put
different amounts of work into books of different kinds. Of course,
the present system doesn't take this into account very well either,
but there are some works now that charge very high prices, i.e.
newsletters. These could still operate outside the standard system.
3.2. Getting Started
Already there exist numerous databases available by telephone from anywhere
in the country. Some of them contain bibliographic information, i.e. abstracts
and references, but others contain the texts of the material. Some of them are
subsidized by government grants, e.g. many of the medical databases, and
others, e.g. the legal databases and the "New York Times" Databank, are profit
making businesses. The charges for using them range from $25 to $200 per hour
except for subsidized customers.
One important step could be taken by the Federal Government. It is required
by the Freedom of Information Act and other laws to make very large amounts of
information available to the public. This information would be much more
conveniently available if it were in a database accessible from anywhere in the
country. This especially includes the Federal Register where all new laws,
regulations, announcements of hearings and requests for comments are published.
3.3. Technical Issues
While it is easy to compute the costs of the storage media, which are already
cheaper than paper, it is harder to calculate the costs of the computers. This
is because present systems have not really been optimized for handling very
large numbers of users. It will also be necessary to optimize telephone
access. For this there are many possibilities.
A daytime cross-country call costs 54 cents for one minute. In a minute
36,000 bytes can be transmitted at 4800 bits/second. This means from $7.50 to
$15.00 to transmit a book uncompressed or from $1.87 to $3.75 with a
compression of 4. We can imagine a terminal that could store a minute's worth
of text and could decompress it for reading. These costs are unpleasantly
high, but they can be reduced in various ways. First, technology permits
substantially lower long distance transmission costs. Indeed the one minute
transcontinental charge late at night is 16 cents making our compressed book
cost from $.56 to $1.12 if transmitted all at once. This is probably less than
the cost of a trip to a library if one's time is worth much. The independent
long distance telephone companies are often 40 percent below AT&T, which brings
our optimistic number down to 33 cents, which is reminiscent of the days when
pocket books were a quarter.
We can suppose that the terminal would remember the telephone number and
catalog number and automatically phone for another minute's transmission when
the reader is close to the end of what it has in storage. These costs are even
less attractive when browsing is wanted. A solution for that is to use the
European telephone charging system which allows calls as short as 4 seconds.
Current networks keep the cost for maintaining a connection down by
time-sharing lines, but this doesn't reduce the cost of straight data
transmission.
An obvious possible saving is to have local libraries with frequently
consulted books and magazines. With optical fibers and other new means of
transmission, the transmission costs can be brought down to the point that
local libraries will be unnecessary.
3.4. French Electronic Library
The time is ripe for it to be socially worthwhile and economically feasible
to put the world literature in the French language into computer form and make
it available world wide.
Image the following system. The French language literature is put into
computer form, either by optical character recognition machines or by
keyboarding in low wage countries. A central computer library in France keeps
this literature on the equivalent of about 1000 IBM 3380 disk files. Three
large bandwidth satellites are put up to provide worldwide transmission
facilities. Reading rooms with suitable terminals are located in every place
where there is sufficient interest. A reader can call up any book or other
document from any terminal. When he does so, the first two pages are
transmitted via the satellite to the reading room computer and the first page
is displayed on his terminal. Perhaps the library catalog and other currently
popular documents are kept in local file.
4. CURRENT STATUS
<Mike Griffith to provide>
5. PLAN FOR RESEARCH
We propose to undertake the following pilot project.
1. A few RA81 disks are acquired from Digital Equipment Corporation and
attached to a VAX computer. This is currently the most
cost-effective disk file available.
2. A request for proposals for a few hundred thousand dollars worth of
book input is sent both to keyboarding companies and those that do
optical character recognition. In addition existing computerized
text is solicited from those who have it for experimental use. The
initial reading list is taken from the public domain literature.
3. About 20 telephone lines are attached to the VAX, so that the
library is available from existing terminals and micro-computers in
the Paris area.
4. The necessary programs are written and installed.
At this point a technical demonstration is feasible. An attempt is
made to determine what is most attractive to the users of the
library within the budget available.
5. An experimental terminal cluster is installed in a reading room in
the Paris area. It should be a place that is open for a large
number of hours.
If the results are encouraging, the second phase includes:
1. Giving the computerized library its own computer.
2. More books.
3. Obtaining the co-operation of publishers of current books, magazines
and newspapers for an expanded program. An experimental financial
arrangement should be adopted.
4. Design of a reading terminal that can be used in connection with the
French telephone system's electronic yellow pages.
5. An experimental reading room in an underdeveloped country using
existing satellite transmission channnels.
6. Developing an optical character recognition system optimized toward
reading books.
The pilot project is intended to lead to a demonstration by the end of 1984
with several thousand books on line.
1. EQUIPMENT PLAN - We expect to start with a VAX with a gigabyte of
memory as the EL Machine located at CMIRH in Paris. This machine
will have at least 32 lines permitting anyone in the Paris region
with a terminal, personal computer or a Minitel to be able to use
it. By 1985 we hope to extend the service throughout France using
the CMIRH network.
2. ACQUISITON - There are already several thousand books available at
"----- Le Langru Francais" at Nancy. We hope to acquire these. In
addition we hope to acquire a similar collection from Britain and
the USA. Also we will have about 1000 books manually entered in
Third World countries. This is expected to be quite inexpensive,
about 2000 FFr per book.
All these different books will probably come in different formats. We will
develop format conversion programs to put them in CMIRH standard format.
Representation. Information on the disk will be stored in a compact form with
frequently occurring words coded and formatting information bracketed
approximately.
Terminals and personal computers with local processing capability will
receive a decoding program followed by coded text which is expected to also
reduce the transmission time and cost. Dumb terminals will receive fully
decoded text. Decoding time should be less than 1 second per 10 words in
sequence.
Transmission. Initially only serial line transmission will be considered.
VAX will support up to 19.2 kiloband transmission. Terminals and personal
computers with local processing will be able to correct transmission error
using Kermit-like programs. They can also accept data at much higher rates for
later presentation at user specified rates.
Presentation. It will be possible to access information from the on-line
library from almost all commmonly available terminals and personal computers.
However, from an ergonomic (human factors) point of view, high resolution
bit-mapped displays (equivalent in resolution to the FAX standard) with a
powerful personal computer with at least 2 megabytes of memory would be highly
desirable. Low cost versions (<$1000) of such terminals should be available by
the end of the decade. It is expected to take at least that long to acquire
and represent a substantial collection of books, reports and newspapers in
electronic form.
Selection. <What books will be on-line in the first year. Mike Griffiths to
approach Academe Francais.>
Table of Contents
1. SUMMARY 0
2. PROBLEM 0
3. BACKGROUND AND NEED 0
3.1. Problems 0
3.2. Getting Started 0
3.3. Technical Issues 0
3.4. French Electronic Library 1
4. CURRENT STATUS 1
5. PLAN FOR RESEARCH 1