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

CALALUCA demonstrated a portion of Volume 160, because it had the most anomalies in it. The software was created by Electronic Book Technologies of Providence, RI, and is called Dynatext. The software works only with SGML-coded data.

Viewing a table of contents on the screen, the audience saw how Dynatext treats each element as a book and attempts to simplify movement through a volume. Familiarity with the Patrologia in print (i.e., the text, its source, and the editions) will make the machine-readable versions highly useful. (Software with a Windows application was sought for PLD, CALALUCA said, because this was the main trend for scholarly use.)

CALALUCA also demonstrated how a user can perform a variety of searches and quickly move to any part of a volume; the look-up screen provides some basic, simple word-searching.

CALALUCA argued that one of the major difficulties is not the software. Rather, in creating a product that will be used by scholars representing a broad spectrum of computer sophistication, user documentation proves to be the most important service one can provide.

CALALUCA next illustrated a truncated search under mysterium within ten words of virtus and how one would be able to find its contents throughout the entire database. He said that the exciting thing about PLD is that many of the applications in the retrieval software being written for it will exceed the capabilities of the software employed now for the CD-ROM version. The CD-ROM faces genuine limitations, in terms of speed and comprehensiveness, in the creation of a retrieval software to run it. CALALUCA said he hoped that individual scholars will download the data, if they wish, to their personal computers, and have ready access to important texts on a constant basis, which they will be able to use in their research and from which they might even be able to publish.

(CALALUCA explained that the blue numbers represented Migne’s column numbers, which are the standard scholarly references. Pulling up a note, he stated that these texts were heavily edited and the image files would appear simply as a note as well, so that one could quickly access an image.)

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FLEISCHHAUER/ERWAY Several problems with which AM is still wrestling Various search and retrieval capabilities Illustration of automatic stemming and a truncated search AM’s attempt to find ways to connect cataloging to the texts AM’s gravitation towards SGML Striking a balance between quantity and quality How AM furnishes users recourse to images Conducting a search in a full-text environment Macintosh and IBM prototypes of AM Multimedia aspects of AM *

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A demonstration of American Memory by its coordinator, Carl FLEISCHHAUER, and Ricky ERWAY, associate coordinator, Library of Congress, concluded the morning session. Beginning with a collection of broadsides from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, the only text collection in a presentable form at the time of the Workshop, FLEISCHHAUER highlighted several of the problems with which AM is still wrestling. (In its final form, the disk will contain two collections, not only the broadsides but also the full text with illustrations of a set of approximately 300 African-American pamphlets from the period 1870 to 1910.)

As FREEMAN had explained earlier, AM has attempted to use a small amount of interpretation to introduce collections. In the present case, the contractor, a company named Quick Source, in Silver Spring, MD., used software called Toolbook and put together a modestly interactive introduction to the collection. Like the two preceding speakers, FLEISCHHAUER argued that the real asset was the underlying collection.

FLEISCHHAUER proceeded to describe various search and retrieval capabilities while ERWAY worked the computer. In this particular package the “go to” pull-down allowed the user in effect to jump out of Toolbook, where the interactive program was located, and enter the third-party software used by AM for this text collection, which is called Personal Librarian. This was the Windows version of Personal Librarian, a software application put together by a company in Rockville, Md.

Since the broadsides came from the Revolutionary War period, a search was conducted using the words British or war, with the default operator reset as or. FLEISCHHAUER demonstrated both automatic stemming (which finds other forms of the same root) and a truncated search. One of Personal Librarian’s strongest features, the relevance ranking, was represented by a chart that indicated how often words being sought appeared in documents, with the one receiving the most “hits” obtaining the highest score. The “hit list” that is supplied takes the relevance ranking into account, making the first hit, in effect, the one the software has selected as the most relevant example.

While in the text of one of the broadside documents, FLEISCHHAUER remarked AM’s attempt to find ways to connect cataloging to the texts, which it does in different ways in different manifestations. In the case shown, the cataloging was pasted on: AM took MARC records that were written as on-line records right into one of the Library’s mainframe retrieval programs, pulled them out, and handed them off to the contractor, who massaged them somewhat to display them in the manner shown. One of AM’s questions is, Does the cataloguing normally performed in the mainframe work in this context, or had AM ought to think through adjustments?

FLEISCHHAUER made the additional point that, as far as the text goes, AM has gravitated towards SGML (he pointed to the boldface in the upper part of the screen). Although extremely limited in its ability to translate or interpret SGML, Personal Librarian will furnish both bold and italics on screen; a fairly easy thing to do, but it is one of the ways in which SGML is useful.

Striking a balance between quantity and quality has been a major concern of AM, with accuracy being one of the places where project staff have felt that less than 100-percent accuracy was not unacceptable. FLEISCHHAUER cited the example of the standard of the rekeying industry, namely 99.95 percent; as one service bureau informed him, to go from 99.95 to 100 percent would double the cost.

FLEISCHHAUER next demonstrated how AM furnishes users recourse to images, and at the same time recalled LESK’s pointed question concerning the number of people who would look at those images and the number who would work only with the text. If the implication of LESK’s question was sound, FLEISCHHAUER said, it raised the stakes for text accuracy and reduced the value of the strategy for images.

Contending that preservation is always a bugaboo, FLEISCHHAUER demonstrated several images derived from a scan of a preservation microfilm that AM had made. He awarded a grade of C at best, perhaps a C minus or a C plus, for how well it worked out. Indeed, the matter of learning if other people had better ideas about scanning in general, and, in particular, scanning from microfilm, was one of the factors that drove AM to attempt to think through the agenda for the Workshop. Skew, for example, was one of the issues that AM in its ignorance had not reckoned would prove so difficult.

Further, the handling of images of the sort shown, in a desktop computer environment, involved a considerable amount of zooming and scrolling. Ultimately, AM staff feel that perhaps the paper copy that is printed out might be the most useful one, but they remain uncertain as to how much on-screen reading users will do.

Returning to the text, FLEISCHHAUER asked viewers to imagine a person who might be conducting a search in a full-text environment. With this scenario, he proceeded to illustrate other features of Personal Librarian that he considered helpful; for example, it provides the ability to notice words as one reads. Clicking the “include” button on the bottom of the search window pops the words that have been highlighted into the search. Thus, a user can refine the search as he or she reads, re-executing the search and continuing to find things in the quest for materials. This software not only contains relevance ranking, Boolean operators, and truncation, it also permits one to perform word algebra, so to say, where one puts two or three words in parentheses and links them with one Boolean operator and then a couple of words in another set of parentheses and asks for things within so many words of others.

Until they became acquainted recently with some of the work being done in classics, the AM staff had not realized that a large number of the projects that involve electronic texts were being done by people with a profound interest in language and linguistics. Their search strategies and thinking are oriented to those fields, as is shown in particular by the Perseus example. As amateur historians, the AM staff were thinking more of searching for concepts and ideas than for particular words. Obviously, FLEISCHHAUER conceded, searching for concepts and ideas and searching for words may be two rather closely related things.

While displaying several images, FLEISCHHAUER observed that the Macintosh prototype built by AM contains a greater diversity of formats. Echoing a previous speaker, he said that it was easier to stitch things together in the Macintosh, though it tended to be a little more anemic in search and retrieval. AM, therefore, increasingly has been investigating sophisticated retrieval engines in the IBM format.

FLEISCHHAUER demonstrated several additional examples of the prototype interfaces: One was AM’s metaphor for the network future, in which a kind of reading-room graphic suggests how one would be able to go around to different materials. AM contains a large number of photographs in analog video form worked up from a videodisc, which enable users to make copies to print or incorporate in digital documents. A frame-grabber is built into the system, making it possible to bring an image into a window and digitize or print it out.

FLEISCHHAUER next demonstrated sound recording, which included texts. Recycled from a previous project, the collection included sixty 78-rpm phonograph records of political speeches that were made during and immediately after World War I. These constituted approximately three hours of audio, as AM has digitized it, which occupy 150 megabytes on a CD. Thus, they are considerably compressed. From the catalogue card, FLEISCHHAUER proceeded to a transcript of a speech with the audio available and with highlighted text following it as it played. A photograph has been added and a transcription made.

Considerable value has been added beyond what the Library of Congress normally would do in cataloguing a sound recording, which raises several questions for AM concerning where to draw lines about how much value it can afford to add and at what point, perhaps, this becomes more than AM could reasonably do or reasonably wish to do. FLEISCHHAUER also demonstrated a motion picture. As FREEMAN had reported earlier, the motion picture materials have proved the most popular, not surprisingly. This says more about the medium, he thought, than about AM’s presentation of it.

Because AM’s goal was to bring together things that could be used by historians or by people who were curious about history, turn-of-the-century footage seemed to represent the most appropriate collections from the Library of Congress in motion pictures. These were the very first films made by Thomas Edison’s company and some others at that time. The particular example illustrated was a Biograph film, brought in with a frame-grabber into a window. A single videodisc contains about fifty titles and pieces of film from that