Digital library initiatives

The Réseau francophone des bibliothèques numériques nationales (RFBNN) (officially unveiled in late October) and Europeana (online since Thursday) are both drawing a lot of attention in these parts. Or, at least by librarians with the same interests as me.

Europeana is drawing criticism (see blog post from the 19^th) for its content and navigability. As much as I wish I could comment on it myself, I continue to be among those who are shut out. The Web site for Europeana states that it will be back online in mid-December, although it seems that some folks in the United States were able to get on since the announcement.

I did have the chance to look through the RFBNN project – this project is mostly headed up by the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales de Québec (where I visited this past August for the conference of the Association internationale francophone des bibliothécaires et documentalistes (AIFBD) and I must say, they do impressive work. The RFBNN project seems to be easy enough to use, but some Francophone countries like Morocco don’t have much of any content. Apparently the BnF is going to try digitizing more, but in the mean time, it’s all just a little anticlimactic.

It’s great that so many new initiatives are out there, especially with the news that was released about the Google Books projects and their new library policy. Libraries are wise to take digitization seriously. However, it’s disappointing when projects are only at best half-finished or in such a beta format that they’re unusable at their time of release. A few years back, I learned in Web design class not to post a Web page if there was no content for it (an “under construction” banner wasn’t good enough) – the idea being that users don’t like to be turned away for any reason. I would think that the same is true of a project as huge as a digital library. I for one, at any rate, am very disappointed.