| The contemporary documents and minutes of the Norwegian Parliament are available on the Internet at these addresses:
Propositions from the Government to the Parliament:
Recommendations from the standing committees and minutes from the sittings of the Parliament: |
My subject will, however, not be the contemporary documents and debates of the Parliament, but the digitalisation of a part - rather a small fraction - of the historical parliamentary documents.
From the beginning of this century a custom developed in the Norwegian Parliament to meet in camera - behind closed doors - to deliberate and vote on issues of certain delicacy. The historical background of these early meetings in camera was the struggle over the union with Sweden, which ended in the separation in 1905. Then came the WW1 during which Norway took precautions to protect her neutrality. In the 1920s there were prolonged debates on the trade agreements with the so-called Twine countriest (Spain, Portugal and France), in the 1920s and 1930s there were struggles with Denmark over territorial claims to Greenland, and with Great Britain over fishing interests and the sea territory. Approaching 1939, defence questions again became an important topic, and after 1945 the Cold War-issues were dominant in these secret sittings of the Parliament.
The minutes of the meetings in camera, as well as secret documents from the Government to the Parliament, were locked up in the archival vaults of the Parliament, and kept secret till the middle of the 1970s. Today this material is available for researchers, and in fact for the general public, up till and including 1965. To facilitate research, and also for reasons of preservation, the Parliamentary Archives in Oslo have embarked on a project to publish these important historical sources. The first result was a book published in 1995 in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WW2. It covers meetings in camera from the outbreak of the war in September 1939 till the German occupation of Norway in April 1940, and then in the reconvened Parliament in 1945. (Moter for lukkede dorer. Stortinget 1939-1945. 28 + 493 pp. Oslo 1995. ISBN 82-91283-09-5.)
While this project was evolving, new means of publishing, other than the traditional book, emerged. Thus rose our project of electronic publishing. In this project we have produced one CD-ROM disk which contains material close to ten volumes like the one mentioned above. If we compare the cost of pressing one CD-ROM to the cost of printing ten such volumes, we find the latter about 200 times as expensive: NOK 10.000 for one disk and about NOK 2.000.000 for 10 bound volumes. If you add to this the convenience of use of the CD-ROM and that the researcher does not have to pack his bookshelves with printed documents which he will never use, the advantages of the CD-ROM over traditional publishing become striking. Electronic publishing offers new opportunities, both to store multi-volume series on a single disk and, in some cases, to create searchable text and link it to scanned images of original documents - as with the CD-ROM disk presented here.
While we were working on the CD-ROM, the Internet appeared as a new means of publishing or distribution. So far we have not entered the Internet highway, but the content of the CD-ROM can at any moment be turned into an on-line database accessible via the Internet. (This remark is no longer true, as on December 15 1998 the Parliamentary Archives presented on the Internet a documentation of the history of the national flag of Norway with facsimiles of archival documents, including proposals in water-colour, most of them dating from the years 1814-1821. Please see http://www.stortinget.no/flagg/flaggindex.htm)
The following is a rough sketch of the main technical stages of our CD-ROM project.
Digitalising printed documents
This was done in two stages, first microfilming and then scanning of the 35 mm microfilm. The result was TIFF image files (1 document page = 1 file). This was done by a laboratory at the National Library of Norway. Their product was delivered on CD-R disks.
Digitalising debates
The original source was manuscripts in various forms, handwritten, typewritten, stencilled and printed. The manuscripts were typed (MSWORD). This was done by a group of particularly experienced stenographic reporters of the Parliament, working in their spare time. The same persons were also responsible for proofreading. Other members of the project group worked on quality control and standardisation according to a fixed layout. The result was MSWORD files (1 meeting = 1 file varying from 1 to more than 50 pages in size).
Surveys and indexes
To facilitate navigation among the more than 6000 pages on the disk we created three surveys and three indexes:
Conversion to a common format (PDF)
The TIFF files (documents) and the MSWORD files (debates, surveys and indexes) were converted to the PDF format by use of Acrobat Exchange O and Acrobat Distiller, respectively. A benefit of using the PDF format is that it gives you maximum control over page design. Images are reproduced faithfully, while fonts, graphics and layout of the MSWORD documents are reproduced almost exactly as in the source file. A page containing graphics may also be smaller in PDF than in TIFF or HTML, a real convenience when pages are sent to the printer.
Creation of an integrated database
The hypertext link and the bookmark functionality of Acrobat Exchange were used to establish a system for navigating between the surveys and indexes on one side and the documents and the debates on the other. The final item was a start page with links to the surveys and indexes.
Production of the CD-ROM
The integrated database of documents, debates, surveys and indexes was transferred to a CD-R disk using the Gear or the Adaptec software. The resulting pilot CD was tested, and a final version sent to a professional CD-ROM producer. 300 copies were made. (Moter for lukkede dorer. Stortinget 1901-1924. Oslo 1997. ISBN 82-91283-23-0.)
Bjorn R. Ronning
Stortingsarkivet
Karl Johansgt. 22
N-0026 Oslo
Tlf./fax: +47 22 31 36 74/22 31 38 59
E-mail: bjorn.ronning@st.dep.telemax.no