This page is meant to bring together information about activities related to the project of a World Digital Mathematics Library (WDML). While (and because) the WDML is a somewhat virtual project in so far as there is neither official funding nor official leadership, quite a number of activities relate to it, creating building blocks towards the big end of making all of mathematics available online worldwide.
JSTOR is a general digitization project for the cultural heritage of the USA. It includes a large collection of mathematical journals. Only citation, no further metadata available, single page view only.
Also known as the "Jahrbuch Project", this projects provides an electronic database containing the reviews from the "Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik" as well as digitized versions of the most relevant publication of the time.
NUMDAM (Numérisation de documents anciens mathématiques) is a French digitization project, providing access to the digitized versions of the French major mathematical journals, extending the collection continuously. The articles are available in PDF and DjVu format.
Descriptions of the articles are provided, including the identifying numbers of the reference journals Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt der Mathematik (not the MSC classification, though), an abstract and the complete bibliography, with each item linked to a digitized version if available, MR and Zbl.
"Project Euclid is a user-centered initiative to create an environment for the effective and affordable distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid is designed to address the unique needs of independent and society journals through a collaborative partnership with scholarly publishers, professional societies, and academic libraries." In particular, Project Euclid has digitized back-files of the given journals and provides free access for many issues. Metadata come with abstract, keywords and classifications (no links to review journals).
The "Göttinger Digitalisierungs-Zentrum" (GDZ) is the digitization center of the State and University Library Göttingen. Using outside funding, there are more than 4 Mio pages of digitized content available (including the digitized Gutenberg Bible). This encompasses more than 1.2 Mio pages of mathematics, accessible through the Mathematica collection.
Partners from ten European countries have joined to build a virtual network and a central access point to make accessible periodicals that have been retrospectively digitised in Europe or anywhere else in the world.
The German project DigiZeitschriften provides digitized versions of German scholarly journals, among them three mathematical ones which are freely available.
The "Biblioteka Wirtualna Matematyki" is a project based at the "Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling" of Warsaw University. The goal is to digitise the mathematical journals in Polish Language.
mini-DML is a French project with the goal, "to collate in one place basic bibliographical data for any kind of mathematical digital article and make them accessible to the users through simple search or metadata retrieval" mini-DML is based at NUMDAM and provides a simple search interface for the collected data.
Ulf Rehmann's (Bielefeld University) site, giving links and information regarding digitization projects and a fairly comprehensive list of digitized mathematics available.
Steven Rockey's account of "a bibliography of where major collections of the digital library of mathematics and statistics are being created and archived".
The paper "Twenty centuries of mathematics: Digitizing and disseminating the past mathematical literature" by John Ewing (2002, March) marks the starting point of the discussions on the WDML.
The results of a one year planning project coordinated by Cornell University Library and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Includes in particular the Final Report [local copy] of that project. Here is a separate list of reports by the different working groups.
A proposal by Mathematical Review and Zentralblatt der Mathematik for a possible format for metadata to exchange information between digitization projects and the review journals.
Paper by Thomas Fischer (SUB Göttingen) describing the Digitization Registry set up at the SUB Göttingen as a proof of concept and testbed for a registry for the WDML.
Paper by Thomas Fischer (SUB Göttingen) on the different data formats used by different content providers to exhibit their metadata using OAI. Gives examples of and some recommendations for these formats.
A proposal by David Ruddy (Cornell University Library) for a Dublin Core Application Profile for mathematical literature: "The beginnings of a possible application profile that defines the use of Dublin Core terms for sharing metadata describing mathematical literature available on-line. It is principally intended to define qualified Dublin Core elements for use in OAI metadata harvesting." (Note: Using Windows, please use Internet Explorer to render this page, with other operating systems or browsers please look at the source code.)
The goal of these recommendations is to make simple Dublin Core metadata more uniform and useful by defining common practices and conventions. This is particularly relevant for the exchange of metadata using the OAI "Protocol for Metadata Harvesting". The recommendations here represent a profile of simple Dublin Core, and, unless noted, all DCMI policies and recommendations regarding the use of simple DC apply. Note that this is still under discussion and a draft version. Please direct comments to
Thomas Fischer.
These recommendations were orginally drafted by:
Thierry Bouche, NUMDAM (Numérisation de documents anciens mathématiques)
Thomas Fischer, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SUB), Göttingen
Claude Goutorbe, Cellule MathDoc, Grenoble
David Ruddy, Project Euclid, Cornell University Library
The Open Archive Initiative's Repository Explorer can be used to explore OAI compliant archives like those of NUMDAM and the Cornell University Library.
DjVu software
DjVu (pronounced like "déjà vu") is a highly compressed file format with (possibly) integrated text layer, well suited for the presentation of scanned images. Information on DjVu is available at the DjVu Zone, "a non-commercial site devoted to the DjVu user community". There are also links for free DjVu software, including stand-alone DjVu-readers (still under development).
Software to work with DjVu
Commercial software for DjVu documents is developed by LizardTech, including a suite of applications to create and manage DjVu documents.
LizardTech also provides free browser plug-ins for most operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
LiNuM (Livres Numérisés Mathématiques = Digitized Mathematical Books) is a small French portal to digitized mathematics books and journals, based at Cellule MathDoc in Grenoble. This is a search facility for several digitization projects.
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