BPN 1725: Dutch db Delpher is Mount Serendipity

At several places in and outside the Netherlands Dutch language newspapers, books, magazines and other text media were digitized and made accessible. The National Library of the Netherlands , university libraries, Google Books and heritage institutions have brought these files together and made them accessible. For example, more than 30 million pages of original texts from more than 1.3 million newspapers and 1.5 million magazine pages and more than 320,000 books from the 15th to the 20th century can be accessed via a single Internet address: www. Delpher.nl. You can delve into this mountain with digital pages, browse and search for relevant information, if you can read Dutch. The database has no English interface.

Digitizing books, newspapers, magazines and other text media has already become a tradition in The Netherlands. The National Library of the Netherlands  has a number of major projects to its name. The book selection Delpher emerged from e.g. National Library projects Early Dutch Books Online and Metamorfoze, but also the Digital Library of Dutch Literature and Google Books, in which Google collaborates with National Library of the Netherlands . The historical newspaper and magazine collection is now also impressive in terms of quantity and variety. Interesting are also scanned radio news bulletins from 1937 to 1989.

What can you do with such a mountain of information? You can spend much time to browse and jump from one article to another article and achieve surprising results. And a targeted search for eg. study purposes can yield a multitude of relevant results. Furthermore, the database is not only accessible to study - and professional purposes, but also individuals can retrieve a lot of information about their family and environment.

 In a study on the history of digital publishing you can find a lot of material. The rise of the newspaper archives, such as nationl paper NRC Handelsblad archive. Tap Viditel and a newspaper article in the Leeuwarder Courant about the launch of the first Dutch public online information service Viditel by former state secretary Neelie Smit-Kroes in Sneek on August 7, 1980 comes up as well as the radio bulletin that day with the notification of the launch of Prestel like videotext system Viditel. And tap Electronic Publishing and an article in the NRC Handelsblad will appear marking the publication of the book by Joost Kist, a later member of the Board of Directors of Kluwer. Likewise search for CD-I and articles appear about the launch by an enthusiastic Philips CEO Jan Timmer, doubts about the success of the medium and the death blow in 1996 by Cor Boonstra. The introduction of the Internet is marked by the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden with an article of October 15, 1994 under the title: Netherlands struggling on the electronic highway. Apart from this kind of interest, one can also look up items from his/her professional life: companies where they worked, publications, published or ads from a former employer.

For individuals Delpher is a place for self-abuse. Tap your own name and look at the result. For me there was a real surprise. I was born in January 1945. My parents lived under the bridge of Arnhem in 1944, but had to evacuate to the east part of the Netherlands. When I was born, no birth announcement could be sent to relative elsewhere in the Netherlands, because there was no working mail service. But in Delpher I found a kind of birth announcement in two newspaper items. I was not aware of the existence nor had I ever seen them in my life.

Top item of May 7, 1945: my grandfarther requests information on family members. Item below of May 12, 1945: my farther responds telling where he is with his family and announces my birth.  

Delpher is an ongoing project. New books are added. The Google Books scanning program adds files. Archives of post 1990 newspapers and magazines will be merged with the older archives. Delpher can be called Mount Serendipity: you will always find something unexpected and useful material, while you're actually looking for something completely different.

Publishers ambivalent in Book Search

It has been silent around the book scan project of Google. But now there is the announcement that Google expands its service Book Search. Publishing companies can now add Book Search to their own site, either the entire service or a customization of their own publications. In this way interested readers can search on keywords for a publication, find the bibliographic data, read a few pages and run to the book store or library to get it. And people on the internet can not read or download the complete book online. Publishers should be happy with this marketing tool provided by Google, you would think.

Google started the service in 2004. By now Google has scanned more than a million books. There are books scanned, which are in the public domain and are copyright free; these are usually provided by libraries. Recently the university library of Gent in Belgium signed a cooperation agreement with Google to scan its special collection from the Book Tower; the books in this collection came into the library with the French revolution when convents and abbeys were confiscated, but brought together in valuable and unique collections. There is not really a discussion about these books as they are in the public domain and hardly handed to readers. In this way more people can enjoy and study the books. So far no trouble, certainly not for the publishers.

But Google also scans copyrighted books. Some times this is done with permission of publishers. The publishers see an opportunity for marketing their publications in this way and like to participate. The Dutch academic publisher Brill for example has agreed to scan all it publications, current and out of stock. People can search on terms and Google guarantees that it will never let a reader read the entire book online or have it downloaded. No problem there; in some cases the publishers have even the courtesy to inform authors of their books being scanned and have them decide to have it scanned. In my case the Dutch publisher Boom ask permission for one of my contributions to a book.

But there are also scans of copyrighted books which are made without the permission of the publisher. In this case libraries offer their collection for scanning to Google, not only books in the public domain, but also copyrighted books. And in this case libraries - usually libraries of universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, but also public libraries like the one of New York - have not asked published for permission to have its books scanned. And that is where the problems start. Google takes the position that it can scan anything in the world, regardless of copyright issues, as it only scans for search terms. Publishers think that Google scans books and keep the entire book in cache, regardless whether it is a collection of search words or key words or the complete text.

This situation brings many publishers into an ambivalent position. On the one hand they give Google permission to scan copyrighted books. On the other hand publishers might find themselves in court with Google fighting over copyright abuse. One of these cases is McGraw-Hill. On the on hand the publisher uses the Google Book Search service on one of its sites, while on the other hand it fights Google in court together with the American Association of Publishers (AAP).

Altogether this project did not win a beauty contest, not for PR nor for principles. Yet it is a nice marketing tool for publishers. On the other hand, there is still an unchartered territory about search engines and copyright, which should be cleared.

Blog Posting Number: 777

Tags: copyright