New Online Texts from Bar-Ilan
Haaretz is reporting that Bar-Ilan University will be the home of a new online library of Hebrew texts, a project initiated by President Shimon Peres.
The works slated for inclusion in the project will be selected by academics from Bar-Ilan and other universities over the next few months. In addition, a section of the data us (?) Hebrew texts, spanning the timeline from the Enlightenment until the modern era. The database will only include texts whose authors have been dead for over 70 years, and whose copyright has become available to the public.
The Web site operators, however, plan to make excerpts of more recently written texts available to Internet surfers with the approval of the authors. Such excerpts will feature links to the publishers’ Web sites where the books may be purchased in their entirety.
There is also an interesting article in the Hebrew Haaretz about a series called “Am ha-Sefer” (”The people of the book”), which is publishing the “classics” of the Jewish people. You can read about it here at the Hebrew Wikipedia or here. There will be twenty-four books in the series. I am not familiar with the series, but it looks like an interesting undertaking. While we are talking about digital texts, the latest article to discuss the future of the printed book and digital texts is “The Library in the New Age” by Robert Darnton. One reaction to Darnton’s article can be found here.