LOC Workshop on Etexts by Library of Congress (the reading list .txt) 📕

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DISCUSSION Using the frame-grabber in AM Volume of material processed and to be processed Purpose of AM within LC Cataloguing and the nature of AM’s material SGML coding and the question of quality versus quantity

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During the question-and-answer period that followed FLEISCHHAUER’s presentation, several clarifications were made.

AM is bringing in motion pictures from a videodisc. The frame-grabber devices create a window on a computer screen, which permits users to digitize a single frame of the movie or one of the photographs. It produces a crude, rough-and-ready image that high school students can incorporate into papers, and that has worked very nicely in this way.

Commenting on FLEISCHHAUER’s assertion that AM was looking more at searching ideas than words, MYLONAS argued that without words an idea does not exist. FLEISCHHAUER conceded that he ought to have articulated his point more clearly. MYLONAS stated that they were in fact both talking about the same thing. By searching for words and by forcing people to focus on the word, the Perseus Project felt that they would get them to the idea. The way one reviews results is tailored more to one kind of user than another.

Concerning the total volume of material that has been processed in this way, AM at this point has in retrievable form seven or eight collections, all of them photographic. In the Macintosh environment, for example, there probably are 35,000-40,000 photographs. The sound recordings number sixty items. The broadsides number about 300 items. There are 500 political cartoons in the form of drawings. The motion pictures, as individual items, number sixty to seventy.

AM also has a manuscript collection, the life history portion of one of the federal project series, which will contain 2,900 individual documents, all first-person narratives. AM has in process about 350 African-American pamphlets, or about 12,000 printed pages for the period 1870-1910. Also in the works are some 4,000 panoramic photographs. AM has recycled a fair amount of the work done by LC’s Prints and Photographs Division during the Library’s optical disk pilot project in the 1980s. For example, a special division of LC has tooled up and thought through all the ramifications of electronic presentation of photographs. Indeed, they are wheeling them out in great barrel loads. The purpose of AM within the Library, it is hoped, is to catalyze several of the other special collection divisions which have no particular experience with, in some cases, mixed feelings about, an activity such as AM. Moreover, in many cases the divisions may be characterized as not only lacking experience in “electronifying” things but also in automated cataloguing. MARC cataloguing as practiced in the United States is heavily weighted toward the description of monograph and serial materials, but is much thinner when one enters the world of manuscripts and things that are held in the Library’s music collection and other units. In response to a comment by LESK, that AM’s material is very heavily photographic, and is so primarily because individual records have been made for each photograph, FLEISCHHAUER observed that an item-level catalog record exists, for example, for each photograph in the Detroit Publishing collection of 25,000 pictures. In the case of the Federal Writers Project, for which nearly 3,000 documents exist, representing information from twenty-six different states, AM with the assistance of Karen STUART of the Manuscript Division will attempt to find some way not only to have a collection-level record but perhaps a MARC record for each state, which will then serve as an umbrella for the 100-200 documents that come under it. But that drama remains to be enacted. The AM staff is conservative and clings to cataloguing, though of course visitors tout artificial intelligence and neural networks in a manner that suggests that perhaps one need not have cataloguing or that much of it could be put aside.

The matter of SGML coding, FLEISCHHAUER conceded, returned the discussion to the earlier treated question of quality versus quantity in the Library of Congress. Of course, text conversion can be done with 100-percent accuracy, but it means that when one’s holdings are as vast as LC’s only a tiny amount will be exposed, whereas permitting lower levels of accuracy can lead to exposing or sharing larger amounts, but with the quality correspondingly impaired.

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TWOHIG A contrary experience concerning electronic options Volume of material in the Washington papers and a suggestion of David Packard Implications of Packard’s suggestion Transcribing the documents for the CD-ROM Accuracy of transcriptions The CD-ROM edition of the Founding Fathers documents *

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Finding encouragement in a comment of MICHELSON’s from the morning session—that numerous people in the humanities were choosing electronic options to do their work—Dorothy TWOHIG, editor, The Papers of George Washington, opened her illustrated talk by noting that her experience with literary scholars and numerous people in editing was contrary to MICHELSON’s. TWOHIG emphasized literary scholars’ complete ignorance of the technological options available to them or their reluctance or, in some cases, their downright hostility toward these options.

After providing an overview of the five Founding Fathers projects (Jefferson at Princeton, Franklin at Yale, John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Madison down the hall from her at the University of Virginia), TWOHIG observed that the Washington papers, like all of the projects, include both sides of the Washington correspondence and deal with some 135,000 documents to be published with extensive annotation in eighty to eighty-five volumes, a project that will not be completed until well into the next century. Thus, it was with considerable enthusiasm several years ago that the Washington Papers Project (WPP) greeted David Packard’s suggestion that the papers of the Founding Fathers could be published easily and inexpensively, and to the great benefit of American scholarship, via CD-ROM.

In pragmatic terms, funding from the Packard Foundation would expedite the transcription of thousands of documents waiting to be put on disk in the WPP offices. Further, since the costs of collecting, editing, and converting the Founding Fathers documents into letterpress editions were running into the millions of dollars, and the considerable staffs involved in all of these projects were devoting their careers to producing the work, the Packard Foundation’s suggestion had a revolutionary aspect: Transcriptions of the entire corpus of the Founding Fathers papers would be available on CD-ROM to public and college libraries, even high schools, at a fraction of the cost— $100-$150 for the annual license fee—to produce a limited university press run of 1,000 of each volume of the published papers at $45-$150 per printed volume. Given the current budget crunch in educational systems and the corresponding constraints on librarians in smaller institutions who wish to add these volumes to their collections, producing the documents on CD-ROM would likely open a greatly expanded audience for the papers. TWOHIG stressed, however, that development of the Founding Fathers CD-ROM is still in its infancy. Serious software problems remain to be resolved before the material can be put into readable form.

Funding from the Packard Foundation resulted in a major push to transcribe the 75,000 or so documents of the Washington papers remaining to be transcribed onto computer disks. Slides illustrated several of the problems encountered, for example, the present inability of CD-ROM to indicate the cross-outs (deleted material) in eighteenth century documents. TWOHIG next described documents from various periods in the eighteenth century that have been transcribed in chronological order and delivered to the Packard offices in California, where they are converted to the CD-ROM, a process that is expected to consume five years to complete (that is, reckoning from David Packard’s suggestion made several years ago, until about July 1994). TWOHIG found an encouraging indication of the project’s benefits in the ongoing use made by scholars of the search functions of the CD-ROM, particularly in reducing the time spent in manually turning the pages of the Washington papers.

TWOHIG next furnished details concerning the accuracy of transcriptions. For instance, the insertion of thousands of documents on the CD-ROM currently does not permit each document to be verified against the original manuscript several times as in the case of documents that appear in the published edition. However, the transcriptions receive a cursory check for obvious typos, the misspellings of proper names, and other errors from the WPP CD-ROM editor. Eventually, all documents that appear in the electronic version will be checked by project editors. Although this process has met with opposition from some of the editors on the grounds that imperfect work may leave their offices, the advantages in making this material available as a research tool outweigh fears about the misspelling of proper names and other relatively minor editorial matters.

Completion of all five Founding Fathers projects (i.e., retrievability and searchability of all of the documents by proper names, alternate spellings, or varieties of subjects) will provide one of the richest sources of this size for the history of the United States in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Further, publication on CD-ROM will allow editors to include even minutiae, such as laundry lists, not included in the printed volumes.

It seems possible that the extensive annotation provided in the printed volumes eventually will be added to the CD-ROM edition, pending negotiations with the publishers of the papers. At the moment, the Founding Fathers CD-ROM is accessible only on the IBYCUS, a computer developed out of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project and designed for the use of classical scholars. There are perhaps 400 IBYCUS computers in the country, most of which are in university classics departments. Ultimately, it is anticipated that the CD-ROM edition of the Founding Fathers documents will run on any IBM-compatible or Macintosh computer with a CD-ROM drive. Numerous changes in the software will also occur before the project is completed. (Editor’s note: an IBYCUS was unavailable to demonstrate the CD-ROM.)

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DISCUSSION Several additional features of WPP clarified

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Discussion following TWOHIG’s presentation served to clarify several additional features, including (1) that the project’s primary intellectual product consists in the electronic transcription of the material; (2) that the text transmitted to the CD-ROM people is not marked up; (3) that cataloging and subject-indexing of the material remain to be worked out (though at this point material can be retrieved by name); and (4) that because all the searching is done in the hardware, the IBYCUS is designed to read a CD-ROM which contains only sequential text files. Technically, it then becomes very easy to read the material off and put it on another device.

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LEBRON Overview of the history of the joint project between AAAS and OCLC Several practices the on-line environment shares with traditional publishing on hard copy Several technical and behavioral barriers to electronic publishing How AAAS and OCLC arrived at the subject of clinical trials Advantages of the electronic format and other features of OJCCT An illustrated tour of the journal *

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Maria LEBRON, managing editor, The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (OJCCT), presented an illustrated overview of the history of the joint project between the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC). The joint venture between AAAS and OCLC owes its beginning to a reorganization launched by the new chief executive officer at OCLC about three years ago and combines the strengths of these two disparate organizations. In short, OJCCT represents the process of scholarly publishing on line.

LEBRON next discussed several practices the on-line environment shares with traditional publishing on hard copy—for example, peer review of manuscripts—that are highly important in the academic world. LEBRON noted in particular the implications of citation counts for tenure committees and grants committees. In the traditional hard-copy environment,