Library of Congress Workshop on Etexts Part 16

8:30 AM Coffee and Danish

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) Princ.i.p.al Methods for Image Capture of Text: Direct scanning Use of microform

Anne R. Kenney, a.s.sistant Director, Department of Preservation and Conservation, Cornell University Pamela Q.J. Andre, a.s.sociate 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 Break

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, a.s.sociation 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, a.s.sociate Coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress Pamela Q.J. Andre, a.s.sociate Director, Automation, and Judith A. Zidar, Coordinator, National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL)

12:30- 1:30 PM Lunch

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 Break

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

6:00 PM Adjourn

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 non-scientific scholarly community. Many of the remarks are drawn from a report the speaker coauth.o.r.ed with Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist at The RAND Corporation.

The speaker a.s.sesses 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 a.n.a.lysis of data, 4) dissemination of research findings, and 5) curriculum development and instruction. The extent to which computation currently permeates aspects of scholarly communication represents a viable indicator of the prospects for electronic texts.

The discussion of current practice is balanced by an a.n.a.lysis of key trends in the scholarly use of information technology. These include the trends toward end-user computing and connectivity, which provide a framework for forecasting the use of electronic texts through this millennium. The presentation concludes with a summary of the ways in which the nonscientific scholarly community can be expected to use electronic texts, and the implications of that use for information providers.

Susan VECCIA and Joanne FREEMAN Electronic Archives for the Public: Use of American Memory in Public and School Libraries

This joint discussion focuses on nonscholarly applications of electronic library materials, specifically addressing use of the Library of Congress American Memory (AM) program in a small number of public and school libraries throughout the United States. AM consists of selected Library of Congress primary archival materials, stored on optical media (CD-ROM/videodisc), and presented with little or no editing. Many collections are accompanied by electronic introductions and user's guides offering background information and historical context. Collections represent a variety of formats including photographs, graphic arts, motion pictures, recorded sound, music, broadsides and ma.n.u.scripts, books, and pamphlets.

In 1991, the Library of Congress began a nationwide evaluation of AM in different types of inst.i.tutions. Test sites include public libraries, elementary and secondary school libraries, college and university libraries, state libraries, and special libraries. Susan VECCIA and Joanne FREEMAN will discuss their observations on the use of AM by the nonscholarly community, using evidence gleaned from this ongoing evaluation effort.

VECCIA will comment on the overall goals of the evaluation project, and the types of public and school libraries included in this study. Her comments on nonscholarly use of AM will focus on the public library as a cultural and community inst.i.tution, often bridging the gap between formal and informal education. FREEMAN will discuss the use of AM in school libraries. Use by students and teachers has revealed some broad questions about the use of electronic resources, as well as definite benefits gained by the "nonscholar." Topics will include the problem of grasping content and context in an electronic environment, the stumbling blocks created by "new" technologies, and the unique skills and interests awakened through use of electronic resources.

SESSION II

Elli MYLONAS The Perseus Project: Interactive Sources and Studies in Cla.s.sical Greece

The Perseus Project (5) has just released Perseus 1.0, the first publicly available version of its hypertextual database of multimedia materials on cla.s.sical Greece. Perseus is designed to be used by a wide audience, comprised of readers at the student and scholar levels. As such, it must be able to locate information using different strategies, and it must contain enough detail to serve the different needs of its users. In addition, it must be delivered so that it is affordable to its target audience. [These problems and the solutions we chose are described in Mylonas, "An Interface to Cla.s.sical Greek Civilization," JASIS 43:2, March 1992.]

In order to achieve its objective, the project staff decided to make a conscious separation between selecting and converting textual, database, and image data on the one hand, and putting it into a delivery system on the other. That way, it is possible to create the electronic data without thinking about the restrictions of the delivery system. We have made a great effort to choose system-independent formats for our data, and to put as much thought and work as possible into structuring it so that the translation from paper to electronic form will enhance the value of the data. [A discussion of these solutions as of two years ago is in Elli Mylonas, Gregory Crane, Kenneth Morrell, and D. Neel Smith, "The Perseus Project: Data in the Electronic Age," in Accessing Antiquity: The Computerization of Cla.s.sical Databases, J. Solomon and T. Worthen (eds.), University of Arizona Press, in press.]

Much of the work on Perseus is focused on collecting and converting the data on which the project is based. At the same time, it is necessary to provide means of access to the information, in order to make it usable, and them to investigate how it is used. As we learn more about what students and scholars from different backgrounds do with Perseus, we can adjust our data collection, and also modify the system to accommodate them. In creating a delivery system for general use, we have tried to avoid favoring any one type of use by allowing multiple forms of access to and navigation through the system.

The way text is handled exemplifies some of these principles. All text in Perseus is tagged using SGML, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This markup is used to index the text, and process it so that it can be imported into HyperCard. No SGML markup remains in the text that reaches the user, because currently it would be too expensive to create a system that acts on SGML in real time.

However, the regularity provided by SGML is essential for verifying the content of the texts, and greatly speeds all the processing performed on them. The fact that the texts exist in SGML ensures that they will be relatively easy to port to different hardware and software, and so will outlast the current delivery platform. Finally, the SGML markup incorporates existing canonical reference systems (chapter, verse, line, etc.); indexing and navigation are based on these features. This ensures that the same canonical reference will always resolve to the same point within a text, and that all versions of our texts, regardless of delivery platform (even paper printouts) will function the same way.

In order to provide tools for users, the text is processed by a morphological a.n.a.lyzer, and the results are stored in a database.

Together with the index, the Greek-English Lexicon, and the index of all the English words in the definitions of the lexicon, the morphological a.n.a.lyses comprise a set of linguistic tools that allow users of all levels to work with the textual information, and to accomplish different tasks. For example, students who read no Greek may explore a concept as it appears in Greek texts by using the English-Greek index, and then looking up works in the texts and translations, or scholars may do detailed morphological studies of word use by using the morphological a.n.a.lyses of the texts. Because these tools were not designed for any one use, the same tools and the same data can be used by both students and scholars.

NOTES: (5) Perseus is based at Harvard University, with collaborators at several other universities. The project has been funded primarily by the Annenberg/CPB Project, as well as by Harvard University, Apple Computer, and others. It is published by Yale University Press. Perseus runs on Macintosh computers, under the HyperCard program.

Eric CALALUCA

Chadwyck-Healey embarked last year on two distinct yet related full-text humanities database projects.

The English Poetry Full-Text Database and the Patrologia Latina Database represent new approaches to linguistic research resources. The size and complexity of the projects present problems for electronic publishers, but surmountable ones if they remain abreast of the latest possibilities in data capture and retrieval software techniques.

The issues which required address prior to the commencement of the projects were legion: