Hi there! Today I wanted to tell you the incredible tale of Michael Hart, founder of the world‘s first digital library. Back in 1971, he started an ambitious project that evolved to provide over 60,000 free books globally. Let me walk you through his pioneering journey.
When Hart was a young grad student, he managed to get access to a high-powered university mainframe computer. This was 1971 – desktop computers didn‘t even exist! University computing was also restrictive, making Hart‘s unlimited access incredibly rare. Still, he persevered until forging the setup to start digitizing books.
On July 4, 1971, Hart launched Project Gutenberg to create the first digital library. He manually typed in the text of the Declaration of Independence, uploading it character by character via teletype machine. It was painstaking work, but the start of something groundbreaking.
Hart soon invited volunteers to help type entries, uploading more classics and reference texts each week. Through mailing lists and Usenet, they collaborated across university networks to digitize and proofread books.
The chart below shows the library‘s amazing growth over decades:
Today, Project Gutenberg offers over 60,000 books in dozens of languages – an incredible achievement! The collection spans everything from literature, to cookbooks to sheet music.
So how does PG turn print books into digital formats? As seen below, volunteers photograph book pages, perform OCR extraction then carefully proofread texts to catch errors. This digitization pipeline allows continuous expansion of accessible ebooks.
Hart spearheaded a movement that inspired the digitization efforts we now take for granted. From Google Books to HathiTrust, so many services have followed Project Gutenberg‘s mission to open information access. Quantifying this impact, there‘s been a 5X increase in reading of public domain books thanks to digitization. Not bad for starting from a teletype terminal!
So next time you borrow an ebook from the library or download a digitized manuscript, take a moment to appreciate Michael Hart‘s pioneering vision. Without his passion and perseverance, the world‘s digital knowledge might look very different. Hart dedicated his life to the cause of open information – a remarkable legacy we continue benefiting from today.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
