Library of Congress Workshop on Etexts Part 15

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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 th.o.r.n.y nature of this issue, which he ill.u.s.trated with the example of the c.u.mbersome 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 partic.i.p.ants 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sumption 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.

Appendix I: PROGRAM

WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS

9-10 June 1992

Library of Congress Was.h.i.+ngton, 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

9:00 AM Welcome

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, a.s.sociate Coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress (Beyond the scholar)

10:30- 11:00 AM Break

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 cla.s.sics 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.

3. American Memory Carl Fleischhauer, Coordinator, and Ricky Erway, a.s.sociate Coordinator, Library of Congress

4. Founding Fathers example from Packard Humanities Inst.i.tute: The Papers of George Was.h.i.+ngton, University of Virginia Dorothy Twohig, Managing Editor, and/or David Woodley Packard

5. An electronic medical journal offering graphics and full-text searchability: The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, American a.s.sociation 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, a.s.sistant 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- 3:30 PM Break

3:30- 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 a.s.sistant to the a.s.sociate 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. La.r.s.en, a.s.sociate Director of Libraries for Information Technology, University of Maryland at College Park Edwin B. Brownrigg, Executive Director, Memex Research Inst.i.tute

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

Wednesday, 10 June 1992

DINING ROOM A, LIBRARY MADISON 620