Fiber-optic cables are able to transmit 100 Gigabytes a second, which means that everything ever written could be transmitted in an hour with such cables. The computerization of public libraries started with the catalogues. Now the collections themselves are being transferred to electronic media, partly by digitizing old printed or microfilmed material and partly by aquisition of new material that has never been published in any other way than electronically. This database provides users in at least 32 different countries with classical Greek source-texts. Patrologia Latina, published by Chadwyck-Healey in Alexandria, Virginia, is a database containing the Latin part of Jacques Paul Migne's editions of the Church Fathers.
Pictures are also accessible through computers and modems.
The Smithsonian Institute in Washington hosts a huge database with images of objects from their collection. In the great project American Memory, pursued by the Library of Congress, selected parts of the collections are transferred to digital media, for instance texts by the founding fathers. The pictures in question are, for instance, the famous Mathew Brady photographs from the civil war, street scenes from New York at the turn of the century, etc. You hear a lot today about the virtual library, which is not a place but an electronic representation. The collection that appears on the computer screen might actually be several collections, several databases situated on different continents.