National Yiddish Book Center Yiddish Literature Project

[Joel Bresler <jbresler...>]

Chevra,

I thought the list might be interested in this update from the president of
the National Yiddish Book Center on their ambitious literature project.
(This was the subject of a recent discussion on the Jewish Music mailing
list.)

B'shalom,

Joel 

From:   Aaron Lansky[SMTP:alansky (at) bikher(dot)org]
Sent:   Tuesday, December 15, 1998 5:36 PM
To:     'jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org'
Cc:     'Gabe Hamilton'; 'jslatti (at) aol(dot)com'; 'Nancy Sherman'; 'Neil 
Zagorin';
'Rinat Schmerling'
Subject:        RE: Recent News--not exactly music


Dear Joel:

Sholem aleykhem -- it was good to hear from you, albeit indirectly.
        
As you guessed, we will be scanning every page of every title in our
collection and storing them as bit-mapped files.  We will then be able to
output affordable, acid-free reprint editions of virtually every title on
demand.  In the future, we'll also be able to offer books in electronic
format, either on cd (or whatever medium is then current) or by direct
download through the internet.  

OCR scan has not yet been perfected for English, let alone Yiddish.
However, once the technology catches up to us, we should be able to run an
OCR-scan of our graphics files.

Scanning at our end is scheduled to begin on February 1.  We expect to
process 800 books a month, or 20,000 over the next two years.  We will then
work with several major research libraries to capture an additional 15,000
Yiddish titles not included in our collection.  Eventually we'll tackle
serials as well.  The entire project should take four to five years to
complete.

How will libraries and individuals know what titles are available?  Within
the next several months we'll begin posting each digitized title to a
user-searchable database resident on our website (yiddishbookcenter.org).
Using library software from VTLS, our records will include both standard
romanization (following AACR2 authorities), as well as the "vernacular"
(the original Hebrew character set).  End-users will be able to search our
database by author, title and LC subject.  Within a year, we should be able
to offer e-commerce ordering directly through our website. 

Once it's up and running, our "Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library"
should make most Yiddish titles available in unlimited quantity in
perpetuity.  Naturally, we're all enormously excited at the prospect.  

Please feel free to post this information and share it as widely as possible.


Best wishes,
Aaron Lansky, President
National Yiddish Book Center


Joel Bresler
250 E. Emerson Rd.
Lexington, MA 02420 USA

Home:   781-862-2432
Home Office:    781-862-4104
FAX:            781-862-0498
Cell:           781-622-0309
Email:          jbresler (at) ultra(dot)net