Project Runeberg's Electronic Facsimile Editions of Nordic Literature

Project Runeberg has been publishing Nordic literature on the Internet since 1992. The project is based at Linköping University, Sweden. In the fall of 1998 a series of experiments were conducted to shift the project from e-text to facsimile images of text pages. The benefits and drawbacks of this shift are evaluated in this paper, and a cost model is presented together with some design decisions and implementation details. Introduction This paper describes the latest development in Project Runeberg, its new technology for electronic facsimile editions. The underlying technical concepts and components are neither novel nor very advanced. The focus of this text is to demonstrate step-by-step how these concepts can be combined into a cost-effective, predictable, scaleable, and user-friendly system for online presentation of paper documents. In our case, this technology is demonstrated on 19th century printed literature from Sweden and the Nordic countries. But the same methods could just as well be applied to printed sheet music, to administrative documents in a company intranet, or manuscript collections. This work was funded by Linköping University [1]. Much of the inspiration for this work was contributed by the University of Michigan’s Making of America (MOA) project [3]. The next section provides a background to Project Runeberg, which is our operational environment. Background Project Runeberg [5] publishes free electronic editions of Nordic literature on the Internet. This started in December 1992 as an activity within Lysator [2], a students’ computer club at Linköping University [1] in Linköping, Sweden. During the first years, a group of students developed the project in their unpaid spare time. A network of volunteers was built among remote users of the growing electronic text collection. Being computer science students and pioneering Internet users, they got inspiration from the development of free software, such as the Linux operating system, and of course from Project Gutenberg [4]. The project’s name brings associations both to Project Gutenberg and to Finland’s great 19th century poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Finland, having been a part of the Swedish kingdom for 600 years, was ceded to Russia in the war of 1808–1809. Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s poem Fänrik Ståls sägner, 1848–1860, recalled the memory of this war in a way that helped to prepare the ground for Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917. This poem was the first work of Nordic literature published by Project Runeberg in early 1993.