So the National Library in Holland (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag) is right next to the National Archive, and both are pretty sweet. Library of Congress has a ways to go, let me tell you.I mean, they've got stuff like this Dutch bookkeeper's journal about his sailing to Korea in 1653. And oh, some of Augustine's confessions. And about 50 other amazing documents on display. Along with a huge newspaper archive, tons and tons of books, and everything that's ever been published in the Netherlands. That you can look at. If you want.
Last weekend coming home from Hogue Veluwe on the bus that was winding around forest roads, we met a man named Harrie who had just come from the Boom Festival in Portugal. Harrie happens to be the programmer who made the medieval texts in the National Library searchable online. Amazing, right?
Harrie said he started out in Internet security, but then realized people couldn't find anything they needed on the web, so he started working on search and retrieval. Be still my heart. So he just wrote a little old program that lets you look at medieval text images and search within them. Wow, there's some fantastic people in the world who do cool stuff. You can try this feature on the KB website, and you can also try it in English, just to make it super easy for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment