A WWW-based digital library for antiquarian collections

Digital library technologies have benefited during the last years from the impressive increase of digital data capture, storage and transmission capabilities along with the consequent fall of their cost [7]. The widespread use of the World-wide Web (WWW) also enables digital libraries to meet a very large, international, population. Relying on digital resources for academic researches is now a reality for many scientists, but it is usually restricted to journals, acts or bibliographic databases. For humanistic studies, a step forward is the digitalization of the historical sources themselves. In France, the digitalization project of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) opened this trend. The BNF WWW server (http://gallica.bnf.fr) has demonstrated the feasibility of diffusing a large, image-based, digital repository over the internet and time has come now for smaller academic institutions to undertake a digitalization program and a public diffusion of a part of their own antiquarian collections.