A first year for DP.LA, the Digital Public Library of America

On April 18th 2014, the Digital Public Library of America's celebrated its anniversary: a first year of public access on the web.

The DPLA is a platform that connects openly the online contents of many libraries, archives, museums and cultural institutions around the USA into a single portal. Everybody can search this digital library and the digital bookshelf in the DPLA is now made of many thousands of single e-books titles from many different digital library partners in the USA.

From a user's point of view, "DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, virtual bookshelf, and faceted search; save and share customized lists of items; explore digital exhibitions; and interact with DPLA-powered apps in the app library."

The most simple URL ever used on the web "dp.la", is today an expanding digital library offering worldwide access to US open digital humanities culture. "The DPLA Digital Hubs Program is designed to establish a national network out of the over forty state/regional digital libraries and myriad large digital libraries in the US, bringing together digitized content from across the country into a single access point for end users, and an open platform for developers". Because the DPLA also fosters collaboration with independent developers: the "DPLA's application programming interface (API) and open data can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps".

But the project started in October 2011 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: "Hundreds of public and research librarians, innovators, digital humanists, and other volunteers—organized into six work-streams and led by a distinguished Steering Committee—helped to scope, design, and construct the DPLA." The DPLA is guided by a Board of Directors "comprised of leading public and research librarians, technologists, intellectual property scholars, and business experts" from around the USA and is based in the 19th century building (1848) of the Boston Public Library. Today, former Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, pioneer Digital Historian Dan Cohen is DPLA Executive Director.  (DPLA staff page and Historical Materials page).

To celebrate the anniversary, the non-profit library network announced six new partnerships with major digital libraries and archives: the US Government Printing Office, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the Indiana Memory and the Montana Memory Project.

Very soon we may think that the DPLA together with  Europeana, the European Digital Library, will form the nucleus of a World Digital Public Library open to everybody in the world accessing the internet. 

Already in November 2011, the "two major digital library networks have reached an agreement to collaborate in ways that will make a large part of the world's cultural heritage available to a large part of the world's population." They both decided to work together to promote the "interoperability" of their meta-data's.  Early Modern historian, author of The Case for Books, Robert Darnton -at that time member of the DPLA Steering Committee and University Librarian at the University of Harvard- said, "The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, 

On 8 February 2013, the Digital Public Library of America released a new version of its Metadata Application Profile (MAP): "This new version is designed to build on the experience of the Europeana Data Model (EDM)" allowing the sharing of the Europeana metadata model. "The DPLA and Europeana have also collaborated on a virtual exhibition, exploring the stories of Europeans migrating to the US: Leaving Europe: A New Life in America' exhibition.videos, and other materials in many formats." And Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, welcomed the agreement, saying that "Europeana was designed to be open and interoperable, and to be able to collaborate with the DPLA is a validation of that aim. By this combined effort on two continents, Europeana and the DPLA hope to promote the creation of a global network with partners from around the world." 

 Looking at this important partnership we may say that more then the digital library contents, the richness and innovative peculiarity of the DPLA project embedded in the semantic Web 3.0, is based on metadata exchange, interoperability of metadata and, above all, on a full Open Access to all the DPLA metadata.

A recent post published by Megan Geuss, staff editor for the blog Ars Tecnica dedicated from 1998 to IT and Digital Technology issues in the USA (Digital Public Library of America to add millions of records to its archive) wrote that "the DPLA says that it has amassed more than seven million digitized items in its archives to date, and in 2013 attracted more than one million unique hits to its website. But the more impressive numbers come from the fact that the digital library made its metadata available to anyone. It reported today that over the year it received nine million hits to its API. Some of the apps that developers have made with the database include “a smartphone app called OpenPics that shows materials from DPLA related to the location where you are standing; a Pinterest-style app called Culture Collage that shows thumbnails of images related to a particular search on an endlessly scrolling page; and an app called FindDPLA that helps Wikipedia editors locate helpful primary sources to cite in their articles.” With third-party apps, the DPLA isn't just a public library, it lets anyone build their own public library to suit their needs."

"Curated" means "Professional" when one's speak about supporting the research practices of historians in Libraries?

I very much liked a post in the  H-HISTBIBL listserv, the H-Net Discussion List for the Study and Practice of History Librarianship, an "international network of librarians, archivists, curators, and scholars interested in the practice and study of bibliographic and library services to support historical study and teaching. It is affiliated with the Association for the Bibliography of History [ABH] and the History Section of the American Library Association". I am reading with interest what both list editors: Charles A.D'Aniello, (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) and Dominique R.Daniel, (Oakland University) are sending in the listserv. I really appreciate the way they use email: precise arguments, short summaries of the issue dealt with, a link to further information. This is a good way to say about important questions in the Digital History and Humanities fields not limited to history librarianship. Daniel and D'Aniello emails are often better than blog posts. They offer a kind of mixture between Twitter and a blog itself.

So I would like to discuss here Dominique R. Daniel's  post (19th March 2013) called "Curation for Discoverability: When Buzzwords Go Bad". It applies directly to my job as library information specialist between history academic users and the library structure itself. It says about what I have to do nowadays: benchmarking four different discovery tools platform (Ebsco, OCLC, SerialsSolution and ExLibris) that the library (European University Institute) selected to replace our Innovative-Encore Discovery tool. (We had to hide Encore from being our first access to our library catalog because of the incoherence in retrieving bibliographic information and displaying them in a correct way to our community.) We define discovery tools as being able "to expose users to content and resources beyond our local holdings, offering a single search point for multiple sources, including our library catalogue, our repository and our electronic resources."

I reproduced the image of Daniel's email and quotation of Barbara Fister's post (College librarian who works at the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota) called "Curation for Discoverability: When Buzzwords Go Bad". This post was  published in her blog, Library Babel Fish, one of the chapter of the broader American Inside Higher Ed portal, the 7 of March 2013. Fister writes: "...for the undergraduate, providing more results for a search doesn't help them figure out which will actually be valuable. We need to help them learn how to curate for themselves. Providing simpler interfaces for more unsorted stuff doesn't really help with that. Maybe we should work harder on the curation thing and ease up on trying to build the ultimate discovery tool." 

Such a quotation connected with the selection of a discovery tool,  reminds me of a central question that we looked at for more than 15 years together with other historians, archivists, librarians: how to teach to use Internet and web contents or, better, how to critically deal with web contents?  

How to validate web contents is a central question in academic environments and not at all maximizing the number of bites available for meta-searching in discovery tools. We don't want to "discover" things when we want instead to retrieve relevant documentation and information which would possibly help to answer specific research and teaching queries. 

So I asked myself, what should be the best tool used in libraries for validating contents? And looking around, my best bet would still be to use and "curate" the good old OPAC. Of course we are talking about a professionally curated OPAC. But now that discovery tools will allow libraries to add all kind of contents and mix everything, frightened librarians -who's thinking that their profession is endangered because of Google- are looking at discovery tools as the ultimate technology offered by the semantic web. These tools may stand for a technological substitute to services that library staff could offer to their users (also providing support to specific electronic resources) and more as a philosophical and "existential" answer to Google so to keep -as ultimate goal- their "real libraries" alive. But opting in for discovery tools in libraries, library users will need even more protection: they will be exposed to the noise and raw contents resulting from answering generic queries performed within non-similar databases collected altogether within discovery tools. 

"Validation" is exactly the contrary of what will be offered when applying a meta-search to many different contents. This will happen independently of the fact that each database will be previously selected by professional librarians. Database's technical functions and contents are created by single publishers not with the intention to be added to discovery tools but to live their own digital life and to answer -using very specific search features- to relevant search strategies not conceived nor planned for wider digital environments. 

Different is the purpose of creating curated digital libraries like Europeana or what will become in the future, the Digital Public Library of America: interoperability of the best meta-data is all about curated and filtered contents for specific communities of users. These data about data -and the way they describe contents- are the most important issue to deal with when speaking about supporting the liability of web contents from different digital origins. This is not at all what we will achieve with library discovery scrambled techniques and mismatch tools which should support academic research.

The buzzwords "curated/curation/curator" are meaning that we have to use a "professional" approach to information where librarians are still needed to orient users, select and filter web contents? This is exactly what Barbara Fister writes asking for maintaining professional interfaces to specialized information in libraries: "we forget that it takes some subject knowledge and some interpersonal skills to match the needs of a particular community of living, breathing human beings to information resources that they will find worthwhile. We no longer trust our curatorial instincts."

These reflections are dealt with in the December 2012 ITHAKA survey by Roger Schonfeld and Jennifer Rutner, "Research Support Services for History Scholars: A Study of Evolving Research Methods in History" (New York: Ithaka S+R, 2012). This important US report is telling about current support practices whihc are not limited to the USA. It tells what should become the best practices  to facing the digital turn in history and on how best supporting the research practices of historians. (History is the first discipline that the think tank institution ITHAKA S+R connected with JSTOR and with Portico have looked at). The role of Libraries, Archives, History Departments, is benchmarked because of the new practices of Historians –the new craft- within our new digital environment.

Following the survey conclusions, libraries seems to play a limited role today because of the availability of many other digital information sources commented Robert B. Townsend in the February 2013 issue of Perspectives on History the American Historical Association (AHA) magazine (Report Claims History Discipline Failing in Modern Research Practices): “the role of the library for historians is narrowing, and serves primarily as a buyer of databases, a source for interlibrary loans, and a pedagogical tool”. 

Looking for "discovery tools" would be in line with what historians "need" from libraries today? Or should we better look at small, and selective web index like EHPS (European History Primary Sources) or browse through big digital libraries and "curated" data's  in Europeana or the DPLA? Anyway, the fact that libraries would provide their users with the best access to databases seems trendy if we follow the conclusions of this survey. So, here comes also  the automated discovery tool. Also because if we follow the survey, professional librarians are often unable to satisfy precise information/documentation queries within specific area's in  history. In fact, the same survey indicates that users don't anymore trust history librarians professional skills. Because of this mistrust or lack of specialized knowledge would we need automated discovery tools? Or could we legitimately argue that these tools are more about the last game for undergraduates? These tools are the last trench or a last illusion (?) offered –with a lot of money for libraries to spend that could be used for other purposes- to follow new media and new commercial information systems developments in poorly staffed library environment?

The ultimate question seems indeed to understand wetter librarians are still or not able to dominate their field of information to support high level research and teaching activities within digital contexts. But labeling these technological substitutes as "curated" information" just because they add databases to their discovery tool would really simplify their work? 

This would mean being driven by technologies, not at all to control them. We are here far away from what the Digital Humanities are about: the human capacity to develop and manage technical tools that would answer scholarly questions in the digital realm. And what are we controlling if we add database contents and web contents to discovery tools: new curated searching activities, text mining capacities that are related to research and teaching profiles in history? If we continue to look for the polar star, we will still recognize where the North stands. So the same will happen with libraries and librarians' role as intermediary between information and information seekers provided that they would continue to update their professional skills.
At the end, do we really care about being now called "curators"?

Remembering Lynn H.Nelson, Pioneer Digital Historian

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Lynn H.Nelson in 1936

"I still remember the early days, though, and I feel myself fortunate to have been there when the world was just beginning to change." (Lynn H. Nelson, 2004).

Sunday the 2nd of September 2012, Lynn H. Nelson, an American Digital History Pioneer passed away. His sun, Lynn Albert Nelson, informed me of this very sad news. From some years now, 2008-2009, we were unable to continue our correspondence. Lynn was becoming blind starting 2003, he lost most of his vision to Macular Degeneration and had to use enormous font sizes on screens for reading what was written in the many emails we exchanged for years between Florence in Italy and Lawrence near Kansas City in the USA. Lynn was a virtual friend and I felt deeply concerned that I should have written something to remember him telling about his role in the development of the history web. 

I am not considering the few paragraphs below as definitive -we are on the internet in its 2.0 version and able to modify it and do better- and I would kindly ask who reads and who knew and met Lynn, to add his/her own comments or to tell more about Lynn H.Nelson. Also important would be to tell me about possible errors both in my written use of the English language and looking at the content of the text itself. But let me begin with Lynn's own fascinating words evocating the birth of the WWW in 1993 he contributed to with the creation of one of the first history web site and looking at the virtual "new frontier".

Lost in Kansas with revolutionary technologies

 "...It was only two months until a new day dawned and colleges and universities throughout the country were scrambling to put up World-Wide Web sites, and HNSource and CARRIE lost their uniqueness and were overshadowed by the well-funded and professionally-staffed projects that began appearing. But there was time enough for me to see the sort of effect that computer telecommunications would have.
     It was in August of 1993 that a friend came back from a business trip/vacation spent traveling in western Kansas, far off the main roads. After he had returned, we were having a cup of coffee downtown so that he could tell me of his adventures. One of these adventures was particularly striking. He had come to a wide spot in the road, you know the sort of place - a gas station with tractor tires and propane tanks stacked alongside it, a couple of farm houses some distance away from the road, an abandoned and decaying old schoolhouse, and the inevitable cafe. Since it was close to lunch time, he stopped and entered the cafe. It was pretty much like a hundred of other such establishments - a counter along one wall, booths along the other, and a few tables in the middle. There was a blackboard with the day's specials, a sign that said "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash," a stack of glasses half-filled with tea waiting to be filled with ice and set before the lunch crowd, the usual friendly and smiling waitress, and the equally usual cook scowling out through the serving window in the side wall.
     The unusual thing about this cafe, however, was that there was a piece of cardboard tacked on the hatrack by the rear booth, and someone had printed on it with a black felt pen the words PUBLIC LIBRARY. My friend was curious about what he considered must be a considerable overstatement, and went back to see the Public Library. As he neared the booth, he heard a strange clacking sound coming from it. The booth contained an old computer and an even older dot matrix printer that was chattering away to itself a line at a time. It had already printed out most of a roll of paper, which had curled under the table and come to rest on a mare's nest of tangled paper sedges. He looked at the screen and saw the opening words "Call me Ishmael . . . ," and, on a piece of paper pasted to the computer, he read "CARRIE: A FULL-TEXT ON-LINE LIBRARY," followed by some words that he didn't understand and couldn't remember. I recall saying, more to myself than to him, "telnet http.cc.ukans.edu login=carrie pw=press [enter]."
     Of course, all of that was a long time ago, as time goes on the net. CARRIE is still there, but has a new address. The lady herself is put a bit in the shade by the face she shows to web surfers who pause a moment at http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/. She has a new manager and boasts a number of web projects and several awards. I still remember the early days, though, and I feel myself fortunate to have been there when the world was just beginning to change. 

For a short Biography

Lynn was born the 21st September 1931 in Harvey, Illinois, USA. He entered the University of Chicago in 1948, receiving the AB degree in 1950. He served in the United States Army 1952-1954 and spent the years 1954-1956 mastering the professions of land surveyor and general engineer. He returned to graduate work at the University of Texas, Austin, receiving another Bachelor's degree in 1958 and, in 1963, completed his dissertation, The Normans in South Wales, 1070-1171, published in 1966 by the University of Texas Press, he joined the staff of the History Department of the University of Kansas where he was awarded the rank of Full Professor in 1972. He turned his academic attention to the history of Medieval Aragon, and has published several books and articles in that field as well as in Late Antiquity. He retired with impaired health in 1998 but continued to work on-line and to pursue historical research. In 1998 he wrote a syllabus for teaching world history which is still available online. He married Carolyn Ann Seymour, a doctorate in Roman History, in 1962, and Lynn Albert Nelson, their son and only child, was awarded a doctorate by William and Mary University in the field of United States Colonial Agricultural and Environmental History. Lynn always claimed that his life was managed by Sam, an assertive black dog who has been his constant companion until recently.
 

Lynn's attention was drawn to Internet communications in 1989, and he devoted much of his energies since that time to encouraging the development of on-line history resources.

"I more or less stumbled into computer telecommunications in 1989 -he wrote telling us about his curiosity for the new digital humanities discipline- rather late in life, but, led by Thomas Zielke, of the University of Oldenburg and list owner of HISTORY@FINNHUTC, and encouraged by Herb Harris, Director of Networking at the Academic Computing Center of the University of Kansas, I soon found myself spending all of my "spare" time attempting to aid in the development of online History facilities". 

The World Wide Web Virtual Library History Central Catalogue

The WWW VL History Central Catalogue -History Network after 1998-, he created, became a very active chapter of the more global WWW VL, the "book and globe logo" project portal to the web started by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW in 1991.

I met Lynn for the first time virtually when I started to collaborate in 1998 to the WWW VL History Central catalogue, adding my Italian History Chapter to it. I remember only few direct phone-calls in Lawrence in Kansas in 2004-2005 during the move of the History Central Catalogue to my University, the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in April 2004 and during the international crisis that suffered the WWW VL project before its destruction in 2005. My mission after the move of the History Central catalogue to the EUI, was –together with Inaki Lopez Martin which contributed a lot to add original contents to the project and with George Laughead from Kansas- to secure the excellent Lynn Nelson old network of sites in a safe and distinguished not for profit environment and to maintain the project as best as we could. 

History Catalogue's Logo

But this mission was in danger in 2005 because of a threat the whole VL suffered. Lynn contacted maintainers and members of the elected WWW VL Council, the old decentralized Virtual LIbrary project to defend the History Catalogue. I was able to build a "dossier" with copies of many emails, explaining the reasons why the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue separated from a faken web site which copied the History project home page and sub-libraries together with its name, "History Central Catalogue". This sad adventure happened because of an obscure individual ambition to centralize and control what had always been, starting 1991, a series of disciplinary separated entries to the web coordinated by an elected Council. In December 2005, Tim Berners-Lee himself felt the need to support Lynn and argued about the originality and authenticity of the History Central catalogue: "The Virtual Library is a valuable thing for the global community, and it does represent the integration of a lot of effort from many people". And in another letter Berners-Lee said: "I would like to thank, on behalf of all the people who have benefited from it, Lynn Nelson for his great effort to build and maintain the WWW Virtual Library for History."  During these events, Lynn wrote the following email for me to use with the management of the European University Institute. 

Quoting the letter fully below is important because it is about Lynn's own description of how the WWW VL History project was created:

In early September 1993, I was contacted by Arthur Secret and Tim Berners-Lee, asking if I would modify HNSource, on the raven system of the University of Kansas, my lynx-based History server to an http/html-based web site with the mission of maintaining an index of web sites relevant to the study of History. I agreed, and WWW-VL History was in operation by 21 September 1993. Berners-Lee participated in the page design and provided the WWW-VL logo (the orb and book) that was to mark my page and any subsidiary pages I established.
I maintained WWW-VL history by myself, without funding, as a mega page of about 250 Kb for the next five years. I was joined from time to time by people who wished to set up pages supplementary to WWW-VL History and, with the approval of Arthur Secret, provided them with a link to the WWW-VL logo as well as one to the logo I has established for WWW-VL History sites subsidiary to my own. Serge Noiret was one of my earliest co-workers in this project.
In 1998 I became aware that the potential of WWW-VL History could not be realized using the structure that had evolved over the years, and so converted WWW-VL History from a mega-page of links to a catalogue pointing to the member WWW-VL History Index sites. At the same time, I realized that I neither could nor should be the sole developer of what was becoming the WWW-VL History Network. I encouraged Serge Noiret to take charge of developing the European section of our network while I concentrated on other regions. Serge and Inaki Lopez-Martin developed that section into the strongest part of the History Network.
In 2003, I lost most of my vision to Macular Degeneration and was no longer able to perform the functions necessary to maintaining the Network. It was clear that someone would have to take over the task of maintaining what had become the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue. The choice was obvious, and upon Serge Noiret's acceptance, I transferred to his care the WWW-VL logo that Tim Berner-Lee had given me, the mission with which I had been entrusted, the History logo that I had created, list ownership of HISTOPS-L, the discussion list established for the use of History site maintainers, and the coordination of Network activities that I had previously performed. He, along with Inaki Martin-Lopez are now managers and owners of the WWW-VL History Network's Central Catalogue, which was mine to give, subject only to the requirements of the mission with which I was entrusted by Tim Berners-Lee.

Lynn Harry Nelson
Professor Emeritus
University of Kansas
1631 Alabama Street
Lawrence KS 66044-4033 USA

Sharing worldwide -and openly- digital scholarship

A part from the years 2004-2005 when moving the project to the EUI and 2005 with the crashdown of the whole VL galaxy, my personal relationship with Lynn in Lawrence, was exclusively build on virtual contacts, sometimes long personal letters, something that only modern Internet technologies during the last quarter of century has allowed to happen. In 1998, the web was very young and it was still possible to imagine that a history network could have been monitored by a team of volunteers that Lynn coordinated. The Wikipedia concept -appeared for the first time in 2001- was already the raison d'être of Lynn's own Virtual Library project. "Maintainers" around the world were sharing openly with a worldwide community of users their knowledge of what was available in national, regional, local history web sites. They used the index Lynn had developped and the organized hyperlinked structure of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Virtual Library built in 1991. The Virtual Library recognizable everywhere thanks to its very personalized logo, is not belonging to any specific place but is ubiquitous and accessible from everywhere with a computer and an internet connection.

Lynn H.Nelson, 1976

Lynn was there when the digital revolution happened. He was a mentor in the field of transnational digital history and humanities computing. In 1998, he wrote an essay for a monographic issue of the Italian contemporary history Journal Memoria e Ricerca, about the origins of the history web and the many projects he created or took part to in the early '90, sometimes even before the birth of the world wide web. So, for the special issue on Linguaggi e Siti, la storia online, (Languages and sites: history online) I was editing between 1998 and 1999 including essays of North American and European history web pioneers, he wrote an essay -available online also in an Italian translation- called Prima del Web: gli sviluppi della storia on line (Before the web: the developments of history online). 

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has kept online Lynn's original online text as it was first published in Italy together with other materials and essays accompanying the online version of the outstanding book dealing with the origin of "digital history" as a discipline written by Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig: Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 

Lynn's essay was telling about the accomplishments of a group of pioneers digital historians from their gathering on HISTORY@FINHUTC, the first Internet discussion list for historians -see Perspectives Newsletter of the American Historical Association, February 1991- to the development of a world-wide network of History-oriented information servers in 1993. This adventure started before the release of the Mosaic browser in August of 1993. "Historians, wrote Lynn in his abstract, had already been working on the Internet for several years to create facilities and assemble materials for the use of other historians generally. Although people were fascinated by the wealth of materials available when the World Wide Web was opened, few asked who had prepared these materials and so the work of these men and women is in danger of being forgotten." In an addendum to this essay, he said also about himself and recounted some of his own experiences during this period of growth of the Internet and especially the BITNET project he coordinated at the University of Kansas. (Email di Lynn H. Nelson, [lhnelson@raven.cc.ukans.edu], 29 of October 1998 to Serge Noiret).

Kansas Heritage Group Symbol

 In this same essay, Lynn describes also the Kansas history online project which anticipated the creation of a Digital Public History field. The Heritage Group at the University of Kansas (http://www.ukans.edu/heritage/), the Kansas History Gateway, established by Lynn H. Nelson within the History Network Source (HNSource) on March 6, 1993, was the second WWW public web site in the USA; the first Kansas history online website. It can be still viewed through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for the versions post 1996 and until December 2004. The Kansas history portal is still online today thanks to the friendly collaboration and the accurate management by another Kansas digital history pioneer, George Laughead from Dodge City, one of the closest collaborator of Lynn and the maintainer of the most complete and organized collection of historical web sites  belonging to the History Central Catalogue, the WWW VL American History catalogue.

CARRIE, A Full Text Digital Library

But at the same time Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg was collecting all kind of digitised version of texts with the idea that "Electronic Texts (Etexts) ... were to be made available in the simplest, easiest to use forms available" but were not easily distributed in that format yet, Lynn was convinced that scholarship should have been freely accessible through the Internet for everybody to read through all different hardware and software systems thanks to the Lynx browser: less developed areas of the world would have benefitted of this virtual knowledge. So Lynn created one of the first Open Access Digital Library worldwide asking in Kansas and elsewhere through his own transnational network of convinced "geeks", for Ph.D. thesis, books, essays, syllabi that could have been entered bites by bites using a FTP connection into the Virtual Library of E-books he called CARRIE:

"I was sitting at my computer one evening several years ago, waiting for the printer to finish plodding through the last few pages when a message from the printer appeared on the screen, telling me that it was out of paper. Or maybe the message was from my fancy new WordPerfect 4.2, telling me that the printer had told my computer to have it tell me that the printer said that it was out of paper. I don't really know. I never have understood these things very well. Anyway, as I was getting the paper and preparing to put it in the printer, I suddenly understood what had just happened and had to sit down to think about it. [...] HISTORY@FINNHUTC was trying to find new places to store the data that it was accumulating. One of the members of the list, Don Mabry at Mississippi State University, had set up RA, a "public FTP" site, from which anyone who knew the net address could fetch copies of any of the files stored there. It was the only such site devoted to the storage of materials for historians. For some reason or another, I was seized by a passionate desire to construct a second site for historical materials, went to the Academic Computer Center here at the University of Kansas, and impetuously asked for the facilities to do so as well as someone to teach me how such a thing was done. It may have been because I was a fat, old, bespectacled, and grey-bearded medieval historian. The technicians could always point to me whenever someone told them that he or she was too old to be learning something like computer telecommunications. Or it might have been that I was the first faculty member to ask to learn how to build something on-line. Whatever the reason, the technical staff took me under their wing, and we soon had KU's first public FTP site, MALIN, named after perhaps the finest historian ever to serve at the University of Kansas. [...] In a talk he was giving at London University on 3 March 1993, Don Mabry clicked on the monitor of the computer at the front of the room to reveal HNSource, with automatic links to every source of historical materials I could find on the net. After demonstrating that HNSource could fetch any of the files in the sites to which it could connect, and could display them on the screen instantly and without downloading, his audience carried him away to a gala lunch at Simpson's on the Strand. Not long afterwards, I fell to thinking about the Gutenberg Project. The Gutenberg folks were planning on distributing the ten thousand books they hoped to have by the year 2000 on a set of CD- ROM's. With the Lynx text browser, that was clearly unnecessary, and I began to build another information server designed to point to electronic texts, to fetch them with the pressing of a key, and to display them on-screen without further ado. By early June [1993], the site was ready with pointers to more than two thousand texts, and had been given the name of CARRIE, in honor of Carrie Watson, the first professional librarian at the University of Kansas and the true founder of its library system and collections."

So CARRIE, A Full Text Electronic Library, is the title Lynn choose for creating the first history full-text electronic library online accessible. CARRIE, Lynn's digital library, is still online at the EUI in Florence and one of his main author and contributor, professor H.B.Paksoy is continuing to send me his scholarship for CARRIE both in print and for the electronic library like his 2012 pamphlet Humans on Mars. And our library OPAC is also cataloguing single titles only available in CARRIE. 

Of course, like Lynn himself wanted to underline in his presentation of CARRIE, the E-Texts virtual library is now made of very "old fashion" e-books: the web developed enormously during the first years of the 3rd Millennium. But CARRIE remains a library full of surprises for who wants to navigate its pages. And Lynn H. Nelson build CARRIE piece by piece, day by day, sitting at his computer and adding chapters like the Carrie Eurasia Collection (CEC), the Donated e-books under copyright, the Reference works and other special collections with original scholarship and primary sources from the European Medieval era  to the Second World War.

Constructing such a library, maintaining a network of history volunteers, keeping constantly in touch with them, was Lynn's intact juvenile task performed with unaltered enthusiasm until he was able to read his computer. The many persons that have had the chance to meet him personally -or online like me-, will never forget how fun it was also to interact with him, hear his marvelous stories and feel always his subtle irony. 

Virtual and closer friends and collaborators will all miss him.