Founded in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is the oldest bookstore in the world dedicated only to travel. The bookstore launched its website in 1999 and a small publishing venture in 2010.
Nested on Ile Saint-Louis surrounded by the river Seine, Librairie Ulysse has offered 20,000 books, maps and magazines, out of print and new, about any country, all packed up in a tiny space, with some treasures impossible to find anywhere else.
Beginning
What were the first steps of Librairie Ulysse? Catherine wrote on the bookstore’s website: “After traveling for ten years on every continent, I stopped and told myself: ‘What am I going to do for a living?’ I was aware of the need to insert myself in a sociey in one way or another. I made a choice by deduction, refusing to have any boss or employee.
Remembering my grandfathers, one being a navigator, and the other one being a bookseller in Perigord [a region in Southern France], and noting that I needed to visit more than a dozen bookstores before finding any documentation on a country as close as Greece, a ‘travel bookstore’ came to my mind during a world tour while I was sailing between Colombo and Surabaya.
To help their patrons deal with the internet, to select and organize information for them, to create and maintain websites, to check specialized databases and to update online catalogs became daily tasks for librarians.
Here are two examples, with Peter Raggett at the Central Library of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and Bruno Didier at the Library of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France.
At the OECD Central Library
Based at the OECD headquarters in Paris, the Central Library offered 60,000 monographs and 2,500 periodicals in 1998, as well as microfilms, CD-ROMs, and databases like Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and UnCover. The library began setting up its own webpages in 1996, on the intranet of the organization, in order to support the staff’s research work.
How about a book-sized electronic device that could store many books at once? The first ebook readers were the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader, launched in Silicon Valley in 1998.
These dedicated electronic readers were the size of a (large and thick) book, with a battery, a black and white LCD screen, and a storage capacity of ten books or so. They could connect to the internet through a computer (for the Rocket eBook) or directly with a built-in modem (for the SoftBook Reader).
They got much attention from book professionals and the general public, with few of them buying them though, because of their rocket-high price — several hundreds of dollars — and a small choice of books in the digital bookstores available on the companies’ websites. Publishers were just beginning to digitize their own books, still wondering how to market them, and worried with piracy concerns.
The British Library began offering digitized versions of its treasures, for example Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the manuscript — some historians believe it might have been written circa 750. The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731. 18th-century transcripts mentioned hundreds of words and characters which were then visible along the charred edges, and subsequently crumbled away over the years. To halt this process, each leaf was mounted on a paper frame in 1845.
As explained on the website of the British Library, scholarly discussions on the date of creation and provenance of the poem continued around the world, and researchers regularly required access to the manuscript. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for study not only raised conservation issues, it also made it unavailable for the many visitors who were coming to the British Library expecting to see this literary treasure on display. Digitization of the manuscript offered a solution to these problems, as well as providing new opportunities for researchers and readers worldwide.
Gabriel — an acronym for “Gateway and Bridge to Europe’s National Libraries” — was launched in January 1997 as a common portal giving access to the internet services of the participating libraries.
As stated on its website: “Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose ‘Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque’ (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.”
In 1998, Gabriel offered links to the internet services of 38 participating national libraries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Vatican City). These links led to OPACs (Open Public Access Catalogs), national bibliographies, national union catalogs, indexes for periodicals, web servers and gophers, with a section for common European projects.
Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product.
This trend was named multimedia convergence, ****with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the International Labor Organization (ILO).
A symposium
The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia Convergence was held in January 1997 at the ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Employers, unionists and government representatives from all over the world came to discuss the information society, the impact of the convergence process on employment and work, and labor relations in the information age. The purpose of these debates was “to stimulate reflection on the policies and approaches most apt to prepare our societies and especially our workforces for the turbulent transition towards an information economy.”
As stated in the introduction to the symposium’s proceedings: “Today all forms of information — whether based in text, sound or images — can be converted into bits and bytes for handling by computer. Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. Digitalization thus allows music, cinema and the written word to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without distinct material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROMs rather than simply books and records.”
The information available in books is “static”, whereas the information available on the internet is regularly updated, thus the need to change our relationship to knowledge.
In 1996, more and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print culture to digital culture was changing the way both teachers and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print culture provided “stable” information whereas digital culture provided “moving” information.
During a conference organized by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) in September 1996, Dale Spender, a professor and researcher, gave a lecture on “Creativity and the Computer Education Industry”, with insightful comments on forthcoming trends. Here are some excerpts:
In the mid-1990s, libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond, with an online catalog and a digital library.
In his book “Books in My Life”, published by the Library of Congress in 1985, Robert Downs, a librarian, wrote: “My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.”
Automation and computers were followed by the internet (1974) and the web (1990), and eased the work of librarians in some way.
The Helsinki City Library in Finland was the first library to launch a website, which went live in February 1994. Other libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf on a broad selection of websites on various topics.
From California, Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993, along with Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDFs) and Adobe Acrobat (for a fee, to make PDFs).
As stated on the website, PDF “lets you capture and view robust information from any application, on any computer system and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and vision.”
As the “veteran” format, PDF was perfected over the years as a global standard for distribution and viewing of information. Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat gave the tools to create and view PDF files in several languages and for several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).
In August 2000, Adobe bought Glassbook, a software company intended for publishers, booksellers, distributors and libraries. Adobe also partnered with Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com to offer ebooks for Acrobat Reader and Glassbook Reader.
In 1993, John Mark Ockerbloom created The Online Books Page as “a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet.”
The web was still in its infancy, with Mosaic as its first browser. John Mark Ockerbloom was a graduate student at the School of Computer Science (CS) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
Five years later, in September 1998, John Mark wrote: “I was the original webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993. The local web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The Online Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of some of Project Gutenberg’s texts.) After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the net. So that’s how my index got started.