brary were available online as
well: "Magna Carta", the first English constitutional text,
signed in 1215, with the Great Seal of King John; the
"Lindisfarne Gospels", dated 698; the "Diamond Sutra", dated
868, sometimes referred to as the world's earliest print book;
the "Sforza Hours", dated 1490-1520, an outstanding Renaissance
treasure; the "Codex Arundel", a notebook from Leonardo Da
Vinci, in the late 15th or early 16th century; and the "Tyndale
New Testament", as the first print version in English by Peter
Schoeffer in Worms.

New treasures followed. The digitized version of the Bible of
Gutenberg was available online in November 2000. Gutenberg
printed its Bible in 1454 or 1455 in Germany, perhaps printing
180 copies, with 48 copies still available in 2000, and three
copies - two full ones and one partial one - at the British
Library. The two full copies - a little different from each
other - were digitized in March 2000 by Japanese experts from
Keio University of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone Communications). The images were then processed to
offer a full digital version on the web a few months later.

1999: LIBRARIANS GET DIGITAL

= [Overview]

The job of librarians, that had already changed a lot with
computers, went on to change even more with the internet.
Electronic mail became commonplace for internal and external
communications. Librarians could subscribe to newsletters and
participate in newsgroups and discussion forums. In 1999,
librarians were running intranets for their organizations, like
Peter Raggett at the OECD Library, or they were running library
websites, like Bruno Didier at the Institute Pasteur Library.
Computers made catalogs much easier to handle, as well as
library loans and book orders. This was the case for Anissa
Rachef at the French Institute in London. Librarians could type
in bibliographic records in a computer database that was
sorting out book records by alphabetical order, with search
engines for queries by author, title, year and subject. By
networking computers, the internet gave a boost to union
catalogs for a state, a province, a department, a country or a
region, and made things simpler for interlibrary loan.

= Two experiences

# At the OECD

The OECD Library was among the first ones in Europe to set up
an extensive intranet for the staff of its organization. What
is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is
rich, in th