LOC Workshop on Etexts - Library of Congress (life books to read .TXT) 📗

Latina Database (PLD) told of disks to come. According to Eric CALALUCA, PLD’s principal focus has been on converting Jacques-Paul Migne’s definitive collection of Latin texts to machine-readable form. Although everyone could share the network advocates’ enthusiasm for an on-line future, the possibility of rolling up one’s sleeves for a session with a CD-ROM containing both textual materials and a powerful retrieval engine made the disk seem an appealing vessel indeed. The overall discussion suggested that the transition from CD-ROM to on-line networked access may prove far slower and more difficult than has been anticipated.

 

WHO ARE THE USERS AND WHAT DO THEY DO?

Although concerned with the technicalities of production, the Workshop never lost sight of the purposes and uses of electronic versions of textual materials. As noted above, those interested in imaging discussed the problematical matter of digital preservation, while the TEI proponents described how machine-readable texts can be used in research. This latter topic received thorough treatment in the paper read by Avra MICHELSON. She placed the phenomenon of electronic texts within the context of broader trends in information technology and scholarly communication.

Among other things, MICHELSON described on-line conferences that represent a vigorous and important intellectual forum for certain disciplines. Internet now carries more than 700 conferences, with about 80 percent of these devoted to topics in the social sciences and the humanities. Other scholars use on-line networks for “distance learning.” Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous growth in end-user computing; professors today are less likely than their predecessors to ask the campus computer center to process their data. Electronic texts are one key to these sophisticated applications, MICHELSON reported, and more and more scholars in the humanities now work in an on-line environment. Toward the end of the Workshop, Michael LESK presented a corollary to MICHELSON’s talk, reporting the results of an experiment that compared the work of one group of chemistry students using traditional printed texts and two groups using electronic sources. The experiment demonstrated that in the event one does not know what to read, one needs the electronic systems; the electronic systems hold no advantage at the moment if one knows what to read, but neither do they impose a penalty.

DALY provided an anecdotal account of the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous methods of research in the field of classics. His account, by extrapolation, served to illustrate in part the arguments made by MICHELSON concerning the positive effects of the sudden and radical transformation being wrought in the ways scholars work.

Susan VECCIA and Joanne FREEMAN delineated the use of electronic materials outside the university. The most interesting aspect of their use, FREEMAN said, could be seen as a paradox: teachers in elementary and secondary schools requested access to primary source materials but, at the same time, found that “primariness” itself made these materials difficult for their students to use.

 

OTHER TOPICS

Marybeth PETERS reviewed copyright law in the United States and offered advice during a lively discussion of this subject. But uncertainty remains concerning the price of copyright in a digital medium, because a solution remains to be worked out concerning management and synthesis of copyrighted and out-of-copyright pieces of a database.

As moderator of the final session of the Workshop, Prosser GIFFORD directed discussion to future courses of action and the potential role of LC in advancing them. Among the recommendations that emerged were the following:

 

* Workshop participants should 1) begin to think about working

with image material, but structure and digitize it in such a

way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and

2) find a common way to build text and images together so that

they can be used jointly at some stage in the future, with

appropriate network support, because that is how users will want

to access these materials. The Library might encourage attempts

to bring together people who are working on texts and images.

 

* A network version of American Memory should be developed or

consideration should be given to making the data in it

available to people interested in doing network multimedia.

Given the current dearth of digital data that is appealing and

unencumbered by extremely complex rights problems, developing a

network version of American Memory could do much to help make

network multimedia a reality.

 

* Concerning the thorny issue of electronic deposit, LC should

initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed

responsibility, that is, bring together the distributed

organizations and set up a study group to look at all the

issues related to electronic deposit and see where we as a

nation should move. For example, LC might attempt to persuade

one major library in each state to deal with its state

equivalent publisher, which might produce a cooperative project

that would be equitably distributed around the country, and one

in which LC would be dealing with a minimal number of publishers

and minimal copyright problems. LC must also deal with the

concept of on-line publishing, determining, among other things,

how serials such as OJCCT might be deposited for copyright.

 

* Since a number of projects are planning to carry out

preservation by creating digital images that will end up in

on-line or near-line storage at some institution, LC might play

a helpful role, at least in the near term, by accelerating how

to catalog that information into the Research Library Information

Network (RLIN) and then into OCLC, so that it would be accessible.

This would reduce the possibility of multiple institutions digitizing

the same work.

 

CONCLUSION

The Workshop was valuable because it brought together partisans from various groups and provided an occasion to compare goals and methods. The more committed partisans frequently communicate with others in their groups, but less often across group boundaries. The Workshop was also valuable to attendees—including those involved with American Memory—who came less committed to particular approaches or concepts. These attendees learned a great deal, and plan to select and employ elements of imaging, text-coding, and networked distribution that suit their respective projects and purposes.

Still, reality rears its ugly head: no breakthrough has been achieved. On the imaging side, one confronts a proliferation of competing data-interchange standards and a lack of consensus on the role of digital facsimiles in preservation. In the realm of machine-readable texts, one encounters a reasonably mature standard but methodological difficulties and high costs. These latter problems, of course, represent a special impediment to the desire, as it is sometimes expressed in the popular press, “to put the [contents of the] Library of Congress on line.” In the words of one participant, there was “no solution to the economic problems—the projects that are out there are surviving, but it is going to be a lot of work to transform the information industry, and so far the investment to do that is not forthcoming” (LESK, per litteras).

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PROCEEDINGS

 

WELCOME

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GIFFORD Origin of Workshop in current Librarian’s desire to make LC’s collections more widely available Desiderata arising from the prospect of greater interconnectedness *

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After welcoming participants on behalf of the Library of Congress, American Memory (AM), and the National Demonstration Lab, Prosser GIFFORD, director for scholarly programs, Library of Congress, located the origin of the Workshop on Electronic Texts in a conversation he had had considerably more than a year ago with Carl FLEISCHHAUER concerning some of the issues faced by AM. On the assumption that numerous other people were asking the same questions, the decision was made to bring together as many of these people as possible to ask the same questions together. In a deeper sense, GIFFORD said, the origin of the Workshop lay in the desire of the current Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, to make the collections of the Library, especially those offering unique or unusual testimony on aspects of the American experience, available to a much wider circle of users than those few people who can come to Washington to use them. This meant that the emphasis of AM, from the outset, has been on archival collections of the basic material, and on making these collections themselves available, rather than selected or heavily edited products.

From AM’s emphasis followed the questions with which the Workshop began: who will use these materials, and in what form will they wish to use them. But an even larger issue deserving mention, in GIFFORD’s view, was the phenomenal growth in Internet connectivity. He expressed the hope that the prospect of greater interconnectedness than ever before would lead to: 1) much more cooperative and mutually supportive endeavors; 2) development of systems of shared and distributed responsibilities to avoid duplication and to ensure accuracy and preservation of unique materials; and 3) agreement on the necessary standards and development of the appropriate directories and indices to make navigation straightforward among the varied resources that are, and increasingly will be, available. In this connection, GIFFORD requested that participants reflect from the outset upon the sorts of outcomes they thought the Workshop might have. Did those present constitute a group with sufficient common interests to propose a next step or next steps, and if so, what might those be? They would return to these questions the following afternoon.

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FLEISCHHAUER Core of Workshop concerns preparation and production of materials Special challenge in conversion of textual materials Quality versus quantity Do the several groups represented share common interests? *

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Carl FLEISCHHAUER, coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress, emphasized that he would attempt to represent the people who perform some of the work of converting or preparing materials and that the core of the Workshop had to do with preparation and production. FLEISCHHAUER then drew a distinction between the long term, when many things would be available and connected in the ways that GIFFORD described, and the short term, in which AM not only has wrestled with the issue of what is the best course to pursue but also has faced a variety of technical challenges.

FLEISCHHAUER remarked AM’s endeavors to deal with a wide range of library formats, such as motion picture collections, sound-recording collections, and pictorial collections of various sorts, especially collections of photographs. In the course of these efforts, AM kept coming back to textual materials—manuscripts or rare printed matter, bound materials, etc. Text posed the greatest conversion challenge of all. Thus, the genesis of the Workshop, which reflects the problems faced by AM. These problems include physical problems. For example, those in the library and archive business deal with collections made up of fragile and rare manuscript items, bound materials, especially the notoriously brittle bound materials of the late nineteenth century. These are precious cultural artifacts, however, as well as interesting sources of information, and LC desires to retain and conserve them. AM needs to handle things without damaging them. Guillotining a book to run it through a sheet feeder must be avoided at all costs.

Beyond physical problems, issues pertaining to quality arose. For example, the desire to provide users with a searchable text is affected by the question of acceptable level of accuracy. One hundred percent accuracy is tremendously expensive. On the other hand, the output of optical character recognition (OCR) can be tremendously inaccurate. Although AM has attempted to find a middle ground, uncertainty persists as to whether or not it has discovered the right solution.

Questions of quality arose concerning images as well. FLEISCHHAUER contrasted the extremely high level of quality of the digital images in the Cornell Xerox Project with AM’s efforts to provide a browse-quality or access-quality image, as opposed to an archival or preservation image. FLEISCHHAUER therefore welcomed the opportunity to compare notes.

FLEISCHHAUER observed in passing that conversations he had had about networks have begun to signal that for various forms of media a determination may be made that there is a browse-quality item,