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

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Michael LESK, executive director, Computer Science Research, Bell Communications Research, Inc. (Bellcore), discussed the Chemical Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a cooperative project involving Cornell University, OCLC, Bellcore, and the American Chemical Society (ACS).

LESK spoke on 1) how the scanning was performed, including the unusual feature of page segmentation, and 2) the use made of the text and the image in experiments.

Working with the chemistry journals (because ACS has been saving its typesetting tapes since the mid-1970s and thus has a significant back-run of the most important chemistry journals in the United States), CORE is attempting to create an automated chemical library. Approximately a quarter of the pages by square inch are made up of images of quasi-pictorial material; dealing with the graphic components of the pages is extremely important. LESK described the roles of participants in CORE: 1) ACS provides copyright permission, journals on paper, journals on microfilm, and some of the definitions of the files; 2) at Bellcore, LESK chiefly performs the data preparation, while Dennis Egan performs experiments on the users of chemical abstracts, and supplies the indexing and numerous magnetic tapes; 3) Cornell provides the site of the experiment; 4) OCLC develops retrieval software and other user interfaces. Various manufacturers and publishers have furnished other help.

Concerning data flow, Bellcore receives microfilm and paper from ACS; the microfilm is scanned by outside vendors, while the paper is scanned inhouse on an Improvision scanner, twenty pages per minute at 300 dpi, which provides sufficient quality for all practical uses. LESK would prefer to have more gray level, because one of the ACS journals prints on some colored pages, which creates a problem.

Bellcore performs all this scanning, creates a page-image file, and also selects from the pages the graphics, to mix with the text file (which is discussed later in the Workshop). The user is always searching the ASCII file, but she or he may see a display based on the ASCII or a display based on the images.

LESK illustrated how the program performs page analysis, and the image interface. (The user types several words, is presented with a list— usually of the titles of articles contained in an issue—that derives from the ASCII, clicks on an icon and receives an image that mirrors an ACS page.) LESK also illustrated an alternative interface, based on text on the ASCII, the so-called SuperBook interface from Bellcore.

LESK next presented the results of an experiment conducted by Dennis Egan and involving thirty-six students at Cornell, one third of them undergraduate chemistry majors, one third senior undergraduate chemistry majors, and one third graduate chemistry students. A third of them received the paper journals, the traditional paper copies and chemical abstracts on paper. A third received image displays of the pictures of the pages, and a third received the text display with pop-up graphics.

The students were given several questions made up by some chemistry professors. The questions fell into five classes, ranging from very easy to very difficult, and included questions designed to simulate browsing as well as a traditional information retrieval-type task.

LESK furnished the following results. In the straightforward question search—the question being, what is the phosphorus oxygen bond distance and hydroxy phosphate?—the students were told that they could take fifteen minutes and, then, if they wished, give up. The students with paper took more than fifteen minutes on average, and yet most of them gave up. The students with either electronic format, text or image, received good scores in reasonable time, hardly ever had to give up, and usually found the right answer.

In the browsing study, the students were given a list of eight topics, told to imagine that an issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society had just appeared on their desks, and were also told to flip through it and to find topics mentioned in the issue. The average scores were about the same. (The students were told to answer yes or no about whether or not particular topics appeared.) The errors, however, were quite different. The students with paper rarely said that something appeared when it had not. But they often failed to find something actually mentioned in the issue. The computer people found numerous things, but they also frequently said that a topic was mentioned when it was not. (The reason, of course, was that they were performing word searches. They were finding that words were mentioned and they were concluding that they had accomplished their task.)

This question also contained a trick to test the issue of serendipity. The students were given another list of eight topics and instructed, without taking a second look at the journal, to recall how many of this new list of eight topics were in this particular issue. This was an attempt to see if they performed better at remembering what they were not looking for. They all performed about the same, paper or electronics, about 62 percent accurate. In short, LESK said, people were not very good when it came to serendipity, but they were no worse at it with computers than they were with paper.

(LESK gave a parenthetical illustration of the learning curve of students who used SuperBook.)

The students using the electronic systems started off worse than the ones using print, but by the third of the three sessions in the series had caught up to print. As one might expect, electronics provide a much better means of finding what one wants to read; reading speeds, once the object of the search has been found, are about the same.

Almost none of the students could perform the hard task—the analogous transformation. (It would require the expertise of organic chemists to complete.) But an interesting result was that the students using the text search performed terribly, while those using the image system did best. That the text search system is driven by text offers the explanation. Everything is focused on the text; to see the pictures, one must press on an icon. Many students found the right article containing the answer to the question, but they did not click on the icon to bring up the right figure and see it. They did not know that they had found the right place, and thus got it wrong.

The short answer demonstrated by this experiment was 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.

LESK concluded by commenting that, on one hand, the image system was easy to use. On the other hand, the text display system, which represented twenty man-years of work in programming and polishing, was not winning, because the text was not being read, just searched. The much easier system is highly competitive as well as remarkably effective for the actual chemists.

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ERWAY Most challenging aspect of working on AM Assumptions guiding AM’s approach Testing different types of service bureaus AM’s requirement for 99.95 percent accuracy Requirements for text-coding Additional factors influencing AM’s approach to coding Results of AM’s experience with rekeying Other problems in dealing with service bureaus Quality control the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion Long-term outlook uncertain *

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To Ricky ERWAY, associate coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress, the constant variety of conversion projects taking place simultaneously represented perhaps the most challenging aspect of working on AM. Thus, the challenge was not to find a solution for text conversion but a tool kit of solutions to apply to LC’s varied collections that need to be converted. ERWAY limited her remarks to the process of converting text to machine-readable form, and the variety of LC’s text collections, for example, bound volumes, microfilm, and handwritten manuscripts.

Two assumptions have guided AM’s approach, ERWAY said: 1) A desire not to perform the conversion inhouse. Because of the variety of formats and types of texts, to capitalize the equipment and have the talents and skills to operate them at LC would be extremely expensive. Further, the natural inclination to upgrade to newer and better equipment each year made it reasonable for AM to focus on what it did best and seek external conversion services. Using service bureaus also allowed AM to have several types of operations take place at the same time. 2) AM was not a technology project, but an effort to improve access to library collections. Hence, whether text was converted using OCR or rekeying mattered little to AM. What mattered were cost and accuracy of results.

AM considered different types of service bureaus and selected three to perform several small tests in order to acquire a sense of the field. The sample collections with which they worked included handwritten correspondence, typewritten manuscripts from the 1940s, and eighteenth-century printed broadsides on microfilm. On none of these samples was OCR performed; they were all rekeyed. AM had several special requirements for the three service bureaus it had engaged. For instance, any errors in the original text were to be retained. Working from bound volumes or anything that could not be sheet-fed also constituted a factor eliminating companies that would have performed OCR.

AM requires 99.95 percent accuracy, which, though it sounds high, often means one or two errors per page. The initial batch of test samples contained several handwritten materials for which AM did not require text-coding. The results, ERWAY reported, were in all cases fairly comparable: for the most part, all three service bureaus achieved 99.95 percent accuracy. AM was satisfied with the work but surprised at the cost.

As AM began converting whole collections, it retained the requirement for 99.95 percent accuracy and added requirements for text-coding. AM needed to begin performing work more than three years ago before LC requirements for SGML applications had been established. Since AM’s goal was simply to retain any of the intellectual content represented by the formatting of the document (which would be lost if one performed a straight ASCII conversion), AM used “SGML-like” codes. These codes resembled SGML tags but were used without the benefit of document-type definitions. AM found that many service bureaus were not yet SGML-proficient.

Additional factors influencing the approach AM took with respect to coding included: 1) the inability of any known microcomputer-based user-retrieval software to take advantage of SGML coding; and 2) the multiple inconsistencies in format of the older documents, which confirmed AM in its desire not to attempt to force the different formats to conform to a single document-type definition (DTD) and thus create the need for a separate DTD for each document.

The five text collections that AM has converted or is in the process of converting include a collection of eighteenth-century broadsides, a collection of pamphlets, two typescript document collections, and a collection of 150 books.

ERWAY next reviewed the results of AM’s experience with rekeying, noting again that because the bulk of AM’s materials are historical, the quality of the text often does not lend itself to OCR. While non-English speakers are less likely to guess or elaborate or correct typos in the original text, they are also less able to infer what we would; they also are nearly incapable of converting handwritten text. Another disadvantage of working with overseas keyers is that they are much less likely to telephone with questions, especially on the coding, with the result that they develop their own rules as they encounter new situations.

Government contracting procedures and time frames posed a major challenge to performing the conversion. Many service bureaus are not accustomed to retaining the image, even if they perform OCR. Thus, questions of image format and storage media were somewhat novel to many of them. ERWAY also remarked other