Digital Library Projects

• The CSDL is working with Professor Eduardo Urbina of the Department of Hispanic Studies on the Cervantes Project. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) is the creator of the modern novel in Don Quijote de la Mancha, and his works are the cornerstone of Hispanic culture and literature. The Cervantes Project, working in cooperation with the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos in Spain, has the following goals: 1) developing a comprehensive digital library of Cervantes' complete works in electronic form; 2) creating a digital archive of related photographic images for teaching and research; 3) developing and publishing on the Web, with the assistance of an international team of collaborators, the Cervantes International Bibliography Online, the first comprehensive bibliography of Cervantes' studies, going back to 1900; and 4) developing computer tools, display interfaces, and user's methodology that can be employed by similar projects in the Humanities.

• Professor Enrique Mallen's On-Line Picasso Project provides a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of Picasso's works. Professor Mallen, from the Department of Hispanic Studies, has been assisted by the CSDL in developing the applications that enable the creation and display of the catalogue.

• The Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the CSDL are collaborating to create the NADL, the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library. The NADL will provide an important resource, focused on the unique needs of Nautical Archaeologists while drawing from the advances that have been made in application of computer technology and networks in the areas of terrestrially-based archaeology.

• The Comparative Romance Linguistics Newsletter electronic edition is being developed by Professor Brian Imhoff of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. The CRLN project has the goal of placing all previously published CRLN Bibliography issues online. In addition, new Bibliography issues will be added as they are published in hard copy form each spring. At present the bibliographies are indexed by year of publication and language; plans to convert the most recent bibliographies to a searchable database are underway.

• The TAMU Herbaria Project is being developed in conjunction with Professors Hugh Wilson and Jim Manhart of the Biology Department and Professor Steven Hatch of the Rangeland Ecology and Management Department. Over 250,000 dried plant specimens are housed in two herbaria on the Texas A&M Campus and provide a focus for study by the Bioinformatics Working Group, consisting of representatives of the CSDL and the herbaria. Current projects include the generation and networked dissemination of a unified database of herbarium specimen data, support for an extensive image gallery, examination of graphical map-based visualizations of plant distributions, and work, in conjunction with the BONAP project, towards computerization of a consistent national taxonomy.

• The CSDL is a participating member in the Flora of Texas Consortium. The goal of this project is to create a digital library containing approximately 6,000 taxa of native and naturalized vascular plants of Texas accessible via the Internet. These materials will be widely used in support of floristics, plant community studies, regional biotic histories and synonymies, distribution maps, and to provide access to illustrations and images of the flora of Texas. This project is being developed in conjunction with Professor Hugh Wilson of the Biology Department and Professor Steven Hatch of the Rangeland Ecology and Management Department.