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

Speaking directly to AM, which he considered was a largely uncopyrighted database, LYNCH urged development of a network version of AM, or consideration of making the data in it available to people interested in doing network multimedia. On account of the current great shortage of digital data that is both appealing and unencumbered by complex rights problems, this course of action could have a significant effect on making network multimedia a reality.

In this connection, FLEISCHHAUER reported on a fragmentary prototype in LC’s Office of Information Technology Services that attempts to associate digital images of photographs with cataloguing information in ways that work within a local area network—a step, so to say, toward AM’s construction of some sort of apparatus for access. Further, AM has attempted to use standard data forms in order to help make that distinction between the access tools and the underlying data, and thus believes that the database is networkable.

A delicate and agonizing policy question for LC, however, which comes back to resources and unfortunately has an impact on this, is to find some appropriate, honorable, and legal cost-recovery possibilities. A certain skittishness concerning cost-recovery has made people unsure exactly what to do. AM would be highly receptive to discussing further LYNCH’s offer to test or demonstrate its database in a network environment, FLEISCHHAUER said.

Returning the discussion to what she viewed as the vital issue of electronic deposit, BATTIN recommended that LC 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 these issues and see where we as a nation should move. The broader issues of how we deal with the management of electronic information will not disappear, but only grow worse.

LESK took up this theme and suggested that LC 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.

GRABER remarked the recent development in the scientific community of a willingness to use SGML and either deposit or interchange on a fairly standardized format. He wondered if a similar movement was taking place in the humanities. Although the National Library of Medicine found only a few publishers to cooperate in a like venture two or three years ago, a new effort might generate a much larger number willing to cooperate.

KIMBALL recounted his unit’s (Machine-Readable Collections Reading Room) troubles with the commercial publishers of electronic media in acquiring materials for LC’s collections, in particular the publishers’ fear that they would not be able to cover their costs and would lose control of their products, that LC would give them away or sell them and make profits from them. He doubted that the publishing industry was prepared to move into this area at the moment, given its resistance to allowing LC to use its machine-readable materials as the Library would like.

The copyright law now addresses compact disk as a medium, and LC can request one copy of that, or two copies if it is the only version, and can request copies of software, but that fails to address magazines or books or anything like that which is in machine-readable form.

GIFFORD acknowledged the thorny nature of this issue, which he illustrated with the example of the cumbersome process involved in putting a copy of a scientific database on a LAN in LC’s science reading room. He also acknowledged that LC needs help and could enlist the energies and talents of Workshop participants in thinking through a number of these problems.

GIFFORD returned the discussion to getting the image and text people to think through together where they want to go in the long term. MYLONAS conceded that her experience at the Pierce Symposium the previous week at Georgetown University and this week at LC had forced her to reevaluate her perspective on the usefulness of text as images. MYLONAS framed the issues in a series of questions: How do we acquire machine-readable text? Do we take pictures of it and perform OCR on it later? Is it important to obtain very high-quality images and text, etc.? FLEISCHHAUER agreed with MYLONAS’s framing of strategic questions, adding that a large institution such as LC probably has to do all of those things at different times. Thus, the trick is to exercise judgment. The Workshop had added to his and AM’s considerations in making those judgments. Concerning future meetings or discussions, MYLONAS suggested that screening priorities would be helpful.

WEIBEL opined that the diversity reflected in this group was a sign both of the health and of the immaturity of the field, and more time would have to pass before we convince one another concerning standards.

An exchange between MYLONAS and BATTIN clarified the point that the driving force behind both the Perseus and the Cornell Xerox projects was the preservation of knowledge for the future, not simply for particular research use. In the case of Perseus, MYLONAS said, the assumption was that the texts would not be entered again into electronically readable form. SPERBERG-McQUEEN added that a scanned image would not serve as an archival copy for purposes of preservation in the case of, say, the Bill of Rights, in the sense that the scanned images are effectively the archival copies for the Cornell mathematics books.

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Appendix I: PROGRAM

WORKSHOP

ON

ELECTRONIC

TEXTS

9-10 June 1992

Library of Congress

Washington, D.C.

Supported by a Grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Tuesday, 9 June 1992

NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION LAB, ATRIUM, LIBRARY MADISON

8:30 AM Coffee and Danish, registration

Prosser Gifford, Director for Scholarly Programs, and Carl

Fleischhauer, Coordinator, American Memory, Library of

Congress

9:l5 AM Session I. Content in a New Form: Who Will Use It and What

Will They Do?

Broad description of the range of electronic information.

Characterization of who uses it and how it is or may be used.

In addition to a look at scholarly uses, this session will

include a presentation on use by students (K-12 and college)

and the general public.

Moderator: James Daly

Avra Michelson, Archival Research and Evaluation Staff,

National Archives and Records Administration (Overview)

Susan H. Veccia, Team Leader, American Memory, User Evaluation,

and

Joanne Freeman, Associate Coordinator, American Memory, Library

of Congress (Beyond the scholar)

10:30-

11:00 AM Session II. Show and Tell.

Each presentation to consist of a fifteen-minute

statement/show; group discussion will follow lunch.

Moderator: Jacqueline Hess, Director, National Demonstration

Lab

1. A classics project, stressing texts and text retrieval

more than multimedia: Perseus Project, Harvard

University

Elli Mylonas, Managing Editor

2. Other humanities projects employing the emerging norms of

the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): Chadwyck-Healey’s

The English Poetry Full Text Database and/or Patrologia

Latina Database

Eric M. Calaluca, Vice President, Chadwyck-Healey, Inc.

Carl Fleischhauer, Coordinator, and

Ricky Erway, Associate Coordinator, Library of Congress

Institute: The Papers of George Washington, University

of Virginia

Dorothy Twohig, Managing Editor, and/or

David Woodley Packard

full-text searchability: The Online Journal of Current

Clinical Trials, American Association for the Advancement

of Science

Maria L. Lebron, Managing Editor

6. A project that offers facsimile images of pages but omits

searchable text: Cornell math books

Lynne K. Personius, Assistant Director, Cornell

Information Technologies for Scholarly Information

Sources, Cornell University

12:30 PM Lunch (Dining Room A, Library Madison 620. Exhibits

available.)

1:30 PM Session II. Show and Tell (Cont’d.).

3:00-

5:30 PM Session III. Distribution, Networks, and Networking: Options

for Dissemination.

Published disks: University presses and public-sector

publishers, private-sector publishers

Computer networks

Moderator: Robert G. Zich, Special Assistant to the Associate

Librarian for Special Projects, Library of Congress

Clifford A. Lynch, Director, Library Automation, University of

California

Howard Besser, School of Library and Information Science,

University of Pittsburgh

Ronald L. Larsen, Associate Director of Libraries for

Information Technology, University of Maryland at College

Park

Edwin B. Brownrigg, Executive Director, Memex Research

Institute

6:30 PM Reception (Montpelier Room, Library Madison 619.)

******

Wednesday, 10 June 1992

DINING ROOM A, LIBRARY MADISON 620

9:00 AM Session IV. Image Capture, Text Capture, Overview of Text and

Image Storage Formats.

Moderator: William L. Hooton, Vice President of Operations,

I-NET

A) Principal Methods for Image Capture of Text:

Direct scanning

Use of microform

Anne R. Kenney, Assistant Director, Department of Preservation

and Conservation, Cornell University

Pamela Q.J. Andre, Associate Director, Automation, and

Judith A. Zidar, Coordinator, National Agricultural Text

Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library

(NAL)

Donald J. Waters, Head, Systems Office, Yale University Library

B) Special Problems:

Bound volumes

Conservation

Reproducing printed halftones

Carl Fleischhauer, Coordinator, American Memory, Library of

Congress

George Thoma, Chief, Communications Engineering Branch,

National Library of Medicine (NLM)

10:30-

11:00 AM Session IV. Image Capture, Text Capture, Overview of Text and

Image Storage Formats (Cont’d.).

C) Image Standards and Implications for Preservation

Jean Baronas, Senior Manager, Department of Standards and

Technology, Association for Information and Image Management

(AIIM)

Patricia Battin, President, The Commission on Preservation and

Access (CPA)

D) Text Conversion:

OCR vs. rekeying

Standards of accuracy and use of imperfect texts

Service bureaus

Stuart Weibel, Senior Research Specialist, Online Computer

Library Center, Inc. (OCLC)

Michael Lesk, Executive Director, Computer Science Research,

Bellcore

Ricky Erway, Associate Coordinator, American Memory, Library of

Congress

Pamela Q.J. Andre, Associate Director, Automation, and

Judith A. Zidar, Coordinator, National Agricultural Text

Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library

(NAL)

12:30-

1:30 PM Session V. Approaches to Preparing Electronic Texts.

Discussion of approaches to structuring text for the computer;

pros and cons of text coding, description of methods in

practice, and comparison of text-coding methods.

Moderator: Susan Hockey, Director, Center for Electronic Texts

in the Humanities (CETH), Rutgers and Princeton Universities

David Woodley Packard

C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Editor, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),

University of Illinois-Chicago

Eric M. Calaluca, Vice President, Chadwyck-Healey, Inc.

3:30-

4:00 PM Session VI. Copyright Issues.

Marybeth Peters, Policy Planning Adviser to the Register of

Copyrights, Library of Congress

5:00 PM Session VII. Conclusion.

General discussion.

What topics were omitted or given short shrift that anyone

would like to talk about now?

Is there a “group” here? What should the group do next, if

anything? What should the Library of Congress do next, if

anything?

Moderator: Prosser Gifford, Director for Scholarly Programs,

Library of Congress

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Appendix II: ABSTRACTS

SESSION I

Avra MICHELSON Forecasting the Use of Electronic Texts by

Social Sciences and Humanities Scholars

This presentation explores the ways in which electronic texts are likely to be used by the nonscientific scholarly community. Many of the remarks are drawn from a report the speaker coauthored with Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist at The RAND Corporation.

The speaker assesses 1) current scholarly use of information technology and 2) the key trends in information technology most relevant to the research process, in order to predict how social sciences and humanities scholars are apt to use electronic texts. In introducing the topic, current use of electronic texts is explored broadly within the context of scholarly communication. From the perspective of scholarly communication, the work of humanities and social sciences scholars involves five processes: 1) identification of sources, 2) communication with colleagues, 3) interpretation and analysis