s, particularly the internet."

Another pioneer in Europe was the French National Library (BnF:
Bibliotheque nationale de France). The BnF launched its digital
library Gallica in October 1997 as an experimental project to
offer digitized texts and images from print collections
relating to French history, life and culture. When interviewed
by Jerome Strazzulla in the daily Le Figaro of June 3, 1998,
Jean-Pierre Angremy, president of BnF, stated: "We cannot, we
will not be able to digitize everything. In the long term, a
digital library will only be one element of the whole library."
The first step of the program, a major collection of 19th-
century French texts and images, was available online one year
later.

# Some projects

In Germany, the Bielefeld University Library (Bibliothek der
Universitaet Bielefeld) began posting online versions of German
rare prints in 1996. Michael Behrens, in charge of the digital
library project, wrote in September 1998: "To some here,
'digital library' seems to be everything that, even remotely,
has to do with the internet. The library started its own web
server some time in summer 1995. (...) Before that, it had been
offering most of its services via Telnet, which wasn't used
much by patrons, although in theory they could have accessed a
lot of material from home. But in those days almost nobody
really had internet access at home... We started digitizing
rare prints from our own library, and some rare prints which
were sent in via library loan, in November 1996. (...)

In that first phase of our attempts at digitization, starting
November 1996 and ending June 1997, 38 rare prints were scanned
as image files and made available via the web. During the same
time, there were also a few digital materials prepared as
accompanying material for lectures held at the university
(image files as excerpts from printed works). These are, for
copyright reasons, not available outside of campus. The next
step, which is just being completed, is the digitization of the
Berlinische Monatsschrift, a German periodical from the
Enlightenment, comprising 58 volumes, and 2,574 articles on
30,626 pages. A somewhat bigger digitization project of German
periodicals from the 18th and early 19th century is planned.
The size will be about 1,000,000 pages. These periodicals will
be not just from the holdings of this library, but the project
would be coordinated here, and some of the technical would be
done her