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Our Mathematical Heritage Versus its Organisatorial and Copyright Nightmare
Talk given at the CEIC Workshop "Across the Digital Divide", June 16, 2005, 10:00-10:30, hosted by the
2nd Joint Meeting of AMS, DMV, ÖMG at Mainz.

The historical Math Literatur
Goals of the DML: Digitize it all! And: Make it accessible!
The new Alexandrian Dream


Year:1445........1800186819001926193119401942.......2005Articles
Georg Hermann Valentin (1848-1926):XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX200,000
Royal Society of London's Catalogue (RSC):XXXXXXXXX48,115
Jahrbuch Fortschritte Math. (JFM):XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX200,000
Zentralblatt Math (Zbl):joint with JFM XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX1,896,000
Math. Reviews (MR):XXXXXXXXXXXX1,894,000
Articles (Type of Articles):125,000150,0001,750,0002,200,000
Plus articles not included: e.g., 88,000 Dissertations in Math Genealogy (H. Coonce)) (estimated) sum: 2,500,000
Pages: (20 Pages per article, estimated) 50,000,000
50,000,000 pages could be encoded (searchable!) within one Terabyte of disk storage -
the capacity of a notebook a few years from now... This is the new "Alexandrian Dream".

This shows the amount of math literature to be digitized in order to create a "DML".
Some estimates are higher, on the other hand:
MathSciNet has links to more than 540,000 "original articles" -- these are probably "born digital" articles.
According to MathSciNet's "Facts and Figures" it gained ca. 600,000 entries since 1995,
which may have been an "overall electronic" publishing border.


To view the DjVu files, you will need a DjVu viewer. It is freely available from DjVuLibre (free software).

Copyright © 2005 by Ulf Rehmann