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7520 lines
417 KiB
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12 years ago
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The Project Gutenberg Etext of LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS
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WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS
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PROCEEDINGS
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Edited by James Daly
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9-10 June 1992
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Library of Congress
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Washington, D.C.
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Supported by a Grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation
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*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Acknowledgements
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Introduction
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Proceedings
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Welcome
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Prosser Gifford and Carl Fleischhauer
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Session I. Content in a New Form: Who Will Use It and What Will They Do?
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James Daly (Moderator)
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Avra Michelson, Overview
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Susan H. Veccia, User Evaluation
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Joanne Freeman, Beyond the Scholar
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Discussion
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Session II. Show and Tell
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Jacqueline Hess (Moderator)
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Elli Mylonas, Perseus Project
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Discussion
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Eric M. Calaluca, Patrologia Latina Database
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Carl Fleischhauer and Ricky Erway, American Memory
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Discussion
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Dorothy Twohig, The Papers of George Washington
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Discussion
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Maria L. Lebron, The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials
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Discussion
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Lynne K. Personius, Cornell mathematics books
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Discussion
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Session III. Distribution, Networks, and Networking:
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Options for Dissemination
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Robert G. Zich (Moderator)
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Clifford A. Lynch
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Discussion
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Howard Besser
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Discussion
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Ronald L. Larsen
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Edwin B. Brownrigg
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Discussion
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Session IV. Image Capture, Text Capture, Overview of Text and
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Image Storage Formats
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William L. Hooton (Moderator)
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A) Principal Methods for Image Capture of Text:
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direct scanning, use of microform
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Anne R. Kenney
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Pamela Q.J. Andre
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Judith A. Zidar
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Donald J. Waters
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Discussion
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B) Special Problems: bound volumes, conservation,
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reproducing printed halftones
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George Thoma
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Carl Fleischhauer
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Discussion
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C) Image Standards and Implications for Preservation
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Jean Baronas
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Patricia Battin
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Discussion
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D) Text Conversion: OCR vs. rekeying, standards of accuracy
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and use of imperfect texts, service bureaus
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Michael Lesk
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Ricky Erway
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Judith A. Zidar
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Discussion
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Session V. Approaches to Preparing Electronic Texts
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Susan Hockey (Moderator)
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Stuart Weibel
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Discussion
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C.M. Sperberg-McQueen
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Discussion
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Eric M. Calaluca
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Discussion
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Session VI. Copyright Issues
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Marybeth Peters
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Session VII. Conclusion
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Prosser Gifford (Moderator)
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General discussion
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Appendix I: Program
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Appendix II: Abstracts
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Appendix III: Directory of Participants
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*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
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Acknowledgements
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I would like to thank Carl Fleischhauer and Prosser Gifford for the
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opportunity to learn about areas of human activity unknown to me a scant
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ten months ago, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for
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supporting that opportunity. The help given by others is acknowledged on
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a separate page.
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19 October 1992
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*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
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INTRODUCTION
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The Workshop on Electronic Texts (1) drew together representatives of
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various projects and interest groups to compare ideas, beliefs,
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experiences, and, in particular, methods of placing and presenting
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historical textual materials in computerized form. Most attendees gained
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much in insight and outlook from the event. But the assembly did not
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form a new nation, or, to put it another way, the diversity of projects
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and interests was too great to draw the representatives into a cohesive,
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action-oriented body.(2)
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Everyone attending the Workshop shared an interest in preserving and
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providing access to historical texts. But within this broad field the
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attendees represented a variety of formal, informal, figurative, and
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literal groups, with many individuals belonging to more than one. These
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groups may be defined roughly according to the following topics or
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activities:
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* Imaging
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* Searchable coded texts
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* National and international computer networks
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* CD-ROM production and dissemination
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* Methods and technology for converting older paper materials into
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electronic form
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* Study of the use of digital materials by scholars and others
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This summary is arranged thematically and does not follow the actual
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sequence of presentations.
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NOTES:
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(1) In this document, the phrase electronic text is used to mean
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any computerized reproduction or version of a document, book,
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article, or manuscript (including images), and not merely a machine-
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readable or machine-searchable text.
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(2) The Workshop was held at the Library of Congress on 9-10 June
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1992, with funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
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The document that follows represents a summary of the presentations
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made at the Workshop and was compiled by James DALY. This
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introduction was written by DALY and Carl FLEISCHHAUER.
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PRESERVATION AND IMAGING
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Preservation, as that term is used by archivists,(3) was most explicitly
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discussed in the context of imaging. Anne KENNEY and Lynne PERSONIUS
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explained how the concept of a faithful copy and the user-friendliness of
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the traditional book have guided their project at Cornell University.(4)
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Although interested in computerized dissemination, participants in the
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Cornell project are creating digital image sets of older books in the
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public domain as a source for a fresh paper facsimile or, in a future
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phase, microfilm. The books returned to the library shelves are
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high-quality and useful replacements on acid-free paper that should last
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a long time. To date, the Cornell project has placed little or no
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emphasis on creating searchable texts; one would not be surprised to find
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that the project participants view such texts as new editions, and thus
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not as faithful reproductions.
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In her talk on preservation, Patricia BATTIN struck an ecumenical and
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flexible note as she endorsed the creation and dissemination of a variety
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of types of digital copies. Do not be too narrow in defining what counts
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as a preservation element, BATTIN counseled; for the present, at least,
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digital copies made with preservation in mind cannot be as narrowly
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standardized as, say, microfilm copies with the same objective. Setting
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standards precipitously can inhibit creativity, but delay can result in
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chaos, she advised.
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In part, BATTIN's position reflected the unsettled nature of image-format
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standards, and attendees could hear echoes of this unsettledness in the
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comments of various speakers. For example, Jean BARONAS reviewed the
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status of several formal standards moving through committees of experts;
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and Clifford LYNCH encouraged the use of a new guideline for transmitting
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document images on Internet. Testimony from participants in the National
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Agricultural Library's (NAL) Text Digitization Program and LC's American
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Memory project highlighted some of the challenges to the actual creation
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or interchange of images, including difficulties in converting
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preservation microfilm to digital form. Donald WATERS reported on the
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progress of a master plan for a project at Yale University to convert
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books on microfilm to digital image sets, Project Open Book (POB).
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The Workshop offered rather less of an imaging practicum than planned,
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but "how-to" hints emerge at various points, for example, throughout
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KENNEY's presentation and in the discussion of arcana such as
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thresholding and dithering offered by George THOMA and FLEISCHHAUER.
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NOTES:
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(3) Although there is a sense in which any reproductions of
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historical materials preserve the human record, specialists in the
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field have developed particular guidelines for the creation of
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acceptable preservation copies.
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(4) Titles and affiliations of presenters are given at the
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beginning of their respective talks and in the Directory of
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Participants (Appendix III).
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THE MACHINE-READABLE TEXT: MARKUP AND USE
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The sections of the Workshop that dealt with machine-readable text tended
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to be more concerned with access and use than with preservation, at least
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in the narrow technical sense. Michael SPERBERG-McQUEEN made a forceful
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presentation on the Text Encoding Initiative's (TEI) implementation of
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the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). His ideas were echoed
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by Susan HOCKEY, Elli MYLONAS, and Stuart WEIBEL. While the
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presentations made by the TEI advocates contained no practicum, their
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discussion focused on the value of the finished product, what the
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European Community calls reusability, but what may also be termed
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durability. They argued that marking up--that is, coding--a text in a
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well-conceived way will permit it to be moved from one computer
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environment to another, as well as to be used by various users. Two
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kinds of markup were distinguished: 1) procedural markup, which
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describes the features of a text (e.g., dots on a page), and 2)
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descriptive markup, which describes the structure or elements of a
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document (e.g., chapters, paragraphs, and front matter).
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The TEI proponents emphasized the importance of texts to scholarship.
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They explained how heavily coded (and thus analyzed and annotated) texts
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can underlie research, play a role in scholarly communication, and
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facilitate classroom teaching. SPERBERG-McQUEEN reminded listeners that
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a written or printed item (e.g., a particular edition of a book) is
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merely a representation of the abstraction we call a text. To concern
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ourselves with faithfully reproducing a printed instance of the text,
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SPERBERG-McQUEEN argued, is to concern ourselves with the representation
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of a representation ("images as simulacra for the text"). The TEI proponents'
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interest in images tends to focus on corollary materials for use in teaching,
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for example, photographs of the Acropolis to accompany a Greek text.
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By the end of the Workshop, SPERBERG-McQUEEN confessed to having been
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converted to a limited extent to the view that electronic images
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constitute a promising alternative to microfilming; indeed, an
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alternative probably superior to microfilming. But he was not convinced
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that electronic images constitute a serious attempt to represent text in
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electronic form. HOCKEY and MYLONAS also conceded that their experience
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at the Pierce Symposium the previous week at Georgetown University and
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the present conference at the Library of Congress had compelled them to
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reevaluate their perspective on the usefulness of text as images.
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Attendees could see that the text and image advocates were in
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constructive tension, so to say.
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Three nonTEI presentations described approaches to preparing
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machine-readable text that are less rigorous and thus less expensive. In
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the case of the Papers of George Washington, Dorothy TWOHIG explained
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that the digital version will provide a not-quite-perfect rendering of
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the transcribed text--some 135,000 documents, available for research
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during the decades while the perfect or print version is completed.
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Members of the American Memory team and the staff of NAL's Text
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Digitization Program (see below) also outlined a middle ground concerning
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searchable texts. In the case of American Memory, contractors produce
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texts with about 99-percent accuracy that serve as "browse" or
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"reference" versions of written or printed originals. End users who need
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faithful copies or perfect renditions must refer to accompanying sets of
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digital facsimile images or consult copies of the originals in a nearby
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library or archive. American Memory staff argued that the high cost of
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producing 100-percent accurate copies would prevent LC from offering
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access to large parts of its collections.
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THE MACHINE-READABLE TEXT: METHODS OF CONVERSION
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Although the Workshop did not include a systematic examination of the
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methods for converting texts from paper (or from facsimile images) into
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machine-readable form, nevertheless, various speakers touched upon this
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matter. For example, WEIBEL reported that OCLC has experimented with a
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merging of multiple optical character recognition systems that will
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reduce errors from an unacceptable rate of 5 characters out of every
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l,000 to an unacceptable rate of 2 characters out of every l,000.
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Pamela ANDRE presented an overview of NAL's Text Digitization Program and
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Judith ZIDAR discussed the technical details. ZIDAR explained how NAL
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purchased hardware and software capable of performing optical character
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recognition (OCR) and text conversion and used its own staff to convert
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texts. The process, ZIDAR said, required extensive editing and project
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staff found themselves considering alternatives, including rekeying
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and/or creating abstracts or summaries of texts. NAL reckoned costs at
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$7 per page. By way of contrast, Ricky ERWAY explained that American
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Memory had decided from the start to contract out conversion to external
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service bureaus. The criteria used to select these contractors were cost
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and quality of results, as opposed to methods of conversion. ERWAY noted
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that historical documents or books often do not lend themselves to OCR.
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Bound materials represent a special problem. In her experience, quality
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control--inspecting incoming materials, counting errors in samples--posed
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the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion. ERWAY
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reckoned American Memory's costs at $4 per page, but cautioned that fewer
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cost-elements had been included than in NAL's figure.
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OPTIONS FOR DISSEMINATION
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The topic of dissemination proper emerged at various points during the
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Workshop. At the session devoted to national and international computer
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networks, LYNCH, Howard BESSER, Ronald LARSEN, and Edwin BROWNRIGG
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highlighted the virtues of Internet today and of the network that will
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evolve from Internet. Listeners could discern in these narratives a
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vision of an information democracy in which millions of citizens freely
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find and use what they need. LYNCH noted that a lack of standards
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inhibits disseminating multimedia on the network, a topic also discussed
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by BESSER. LARSEN addressed the issues of network scalability and
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modularity and commented upon the difficulty of anticipating the effects
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of growth in orders of magnitude. BROWNRIGG talked about the ability of
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packet radio to provide certain links in a network without the need for
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wiring. However, the presenters also called attention to the
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shortcomings and incongruities of present-day computer networks. For
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example: 1) Network use is growing dramatically, but much network
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traffic consists of personal communication (E-mail). 2) Large bodies of
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information are available, but a user's ability to search across their
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entirety is limited. 3) There are significant resources for science and
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technology, but few network sources provide content in the humanities.
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4) Machine-readable texts are commonplace, but the capability of the
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system to deal with images (let alone other media formats) lags behind.
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A glimpse of a multimedia future for networks, however, was provided by
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Maria LEBRON in her overview of the Online Journal of Current Clinical
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Trials (OJCCT), and the process of scholarly publishing on-line.
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The contrasting form of the CD-ROM disk was never systematically
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analyzed, but attendees could glean an impression from several of the
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show-and-tell presentations. The Perseus and American Memory examples
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demonstrated recently published disks, while the descriptions of the
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IBYCUS version of the Papers of George Washington and Chadwyck-Healey's
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Patrologia Latina Database (PLD) told of disks to come. According to
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Eric CALALUCA, PLD's principal focus has been on converting Jacques-Paul
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Migne's definitive collection of Latin texts to machine-readable form.
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Although everyone could share the network advocates' enthusiasm for an
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on-line future, the possibility of rolling up one's sleeves for a session
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with a CD-ROM containing both textual materials and a powerful retrieval
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engine made the disk seem an appealing vessel indeed. The overall
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discussion suggested that the transition from CD-ROM to on-line networked
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access may prove far slower and more difficult than has been anticipated.
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WHO ARE THE USERS AND WHAT DO THEY DO?
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Although concerned with the technicalities of production, the Workshop
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never lost sight of the purposes and uses of electronic versions of
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textual materials. As noted above, those interested in imaging discussed
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the problematical matter of digital preservation, while the TEI proponents
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described how machine-readable texts can be used in research. This latter
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topic received thorough treatment in the paper read by Avra MICHELSON.
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She placed the phenomenon of electronic texts within the context of
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broader trends in information technology and scholarly communication.
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Among other things, MICHELSON described on-line conferences that
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represent a vigorous and important intellectual forum for certain
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disciplines. Internet now carries more than 700 conferences, with about
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80 percent of these devoted to topics in the social sciences and the
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humanities. Other scholars use on-line networks for "distance learning."
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Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous growth in end-user computing;
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professors today are less likely than their predecessors to ask the
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campus computer center to process their data. Electronic texts are one
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key to these sophisticated applications, MICHELSON reported, and more and
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more scholars in the humanities now work in an on-line environment.
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Toward the end of the Workshop, Michael LESK presented a corollary to
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MICHELSON's talk, reporting the results of an experiment that compared
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the work of one group of chemistry students using traditional printed
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texts and two groups using electronic sources. The experiment
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demonstrated that in the event one does not know what to read, one needs
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the electronic systems; the electronic systems hold no advantage at the
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moment if one knows what to read, but neither do they impose a penalty.
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DALY provided an anecdotal account of the revolutionizing impact of the
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new technology on his previous methods of research in the field of classics.
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His account, by extrapolation, served to illustrate in part the arguments
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made by MICHELSON concerning the positive effects of the sudden and radical
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transformation being wrought in the ways scholars work.
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Susan VECCIA and Joanne FREEMAN delineated the use of electronic
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materials outside the university. The most interesting aspect of their
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use, FREEMAN said, could be seen as a paradox: teachers in elementary
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and secondary schools requested access to primary source materials but,
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|
at the same time, found that "primariness" itself made these materials
|
||
|
difficult for their students to use.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
OTHER TOPICS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Marybeth PETERS reviewed copyright law in the United States and offered
|
||
|
advice during a lively discussion of this subject. But uncertainty
|
||
|
remains concerning the price of copyright in a digital medium, because a
|
||
|
solution remains to be worked out concerning management and synthesis of
|
||
|
copyrighted and out-of-copyright pieces of a database.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As moderator of the final session of the Workshop, Prosser GIFFORD directed
|
||
|
discussion to future courses of action and the potential role of LC in
|
||
|
advancing them. Among the recommendations that emerged were the following:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Workshop participants should 1) begin to think about working
|
||
|
with image material, but structure and digitize it in such a
|
||
|
way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and
|
||
|
2) find a common way to build text and images together so that
|
||
|
they can be used jointly at some stage in the future, with
|
||
|
appropriate network support, because that is how users will want
|
||
|
to access these materials. The Library might encourage attempts
|
||
|
to bring together people who are working on texts and images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* A network version of American Memory should be developed or
|
||
|
consideration should be given to making the data in it
|
||
|
available to people interested in doing network multimedia.
|
||
|
Given the current dearth of digital data that is appealing and
|
||
|
unencumbered by extremely complex rights problems, developing a
|
||
|
network version of American Memory could do much to help make
|
||
|
network multimedia a reality.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Concerning the thorny issue of electronic deposit, LC should
|
||
|
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 the
|
||
|
issues related to electronic deposit and see where we as a
|
||
|
nation should move. For example, LC might 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. LC must also deal with the
|
||
|
concept of on-line publishing, determining, among other things,
|
||
|
how serials such as OJCCT might be deposited for copyright.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Since a number of projects are planning to carry out
|
||
|
preservation by creating digital images that will end up in
|
||
|
on-line or near-line storage at some institution, LC might play
|
||
|
a helpful role, at least in the near term, by accelerating how
|
||
|
to catalog that information into the Research Library Information
|
||
|
Network (RLIN) and then into OCLC, so that it would be accessible.
|
||
|
This would reduce the possibility of multiple institutions digitizing
|
||
|
the same work.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
CONCLUSION
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Workshop was valuable because it brought together partisans from
|
||
|
various groups and provided an occasion to compare goals and methods.
|
||
|
The more committed partisans frequently communicate with others in their
|
||
|
groups, but less often across group boundaries. The Workshop was also
|
||
|
valuable to attendees--including those involved with American Memory--who
|
||
|
came less committed to particular approaches or concepts. These
|
||
|
attendees learned a great deal, and plan to select and employ elements of
|
||
|
imaging, text-coding, and networked distribution that suit their
|
||
|
respective projects and purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Still, reality rears its ugly head: no breakthrough has been achieved.
|
||
|
On the imaging side, one confronts a proliferation of competing
|
||
|
data-interchange standards and a lack of consensus on the role of digital
|
||
|
facsimiles in preservation. In the realm of machine-readable texts, one
|
||
|
encounters a reasonably mature standard but methodological difficulties
|
||
|
and high costs. These latter problems, of course, represent a special
|
||
|
impediment to the desire, as it is sometimes expressed in the popular
|
||
|
press, "to put the [contents of the] Library of Congress on line." In
|
||
|
the words of one participant, there was "no solution to the economic
|
||
|
problems--the projects that are out there are surviving, but it is going
|
||
|
to be a lot of work to transform the information industry, and so far the
|
||
|
investment to do that is not forthcoming" (LESK, per litteras).
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
PROCEEDINGS
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
WELCOME
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
GIFFORD * Origin of Workshop in current Librarian's desire to make LC's
|
||
|
collections more widely available * Desiderata arising from the prospect
|
||
|
of greater interconnectedness *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
After welcoming participants on behalf of the Library of Congress,
|
||
|
American Memory (AM), and the National Demonstration Lab, Prosser
|
||
|
GIFFORD, director for scholarly programs, Library of Congress, located
|
||
|
the origin of the Workshop on Electronic Texts in a conversation he had
|
||
|
had considerably more than a year ago with Carl FLEISCHHAUER concerning
|
||
|
some of the issues faced by AM. On the assumption that numerous other
|
||
|
people were asking the same questions, the decision was made to bring
|
||
|
together as many of these people as possible to ask the same questions
|
||
|
together. In a deeper sense, GIFFORD said, the origin of the Workshop
|
||
|
lay in the desire of the current Librarian of Congress, James H.
|
||
|
Billington, to make the collections of the Library, especially those
|
||
|
offering unique or unusual testimony on aspects of the American
|
||
|
experience, available to a much wider circle of users than those few
|
||
|
people who can come to Washington to use them. This meant that the
|
||
|
emphasis of AM, from the outset, has been on archival collections of the
|
||
|
basic material, and on making these collections themselves available,
|
||
|
rather than selected or heavily edited products.
|
||
|
|
||
|
From AM's emphasis followed the questions with which the Workshop began:
|
||
|
who will use these materials, and in what form will they wish to use
|
||
|
them. But an even larger issue deserving mention, in GIFFORD's view, was
|
||
|
the phenomenal growth in Internet connectivity. He expressed the hope
|
||
|
that the prospect of greater interconnectedness than ever before would
|
||
|
lead to: 1) much more cooperative and mutually supportive endeavors; 2)
|
||
|
development of systems of shared and distributed responsibilities to
|
||
|
avoid duplication and to ensure accuracy and preservation of unique
|
||
|
materials; and 3) agreement on the necessary standards and development of
|
||
|
the appropriate directories and indices to make navigation
|
||
|
straightforward among the varied resources that are, and increasingly
|
||
|
will be, available. In this connection, GIFFORD requested that
|
||
|
participants reflect from the outset upon the sorts of outcomes they
|
||
|
thought the Workshop might have. Did those present constitute a group
|
||
|
with sufficient common interests to propose a next step or next steps,
|
||
|
and if so, what might those be? They would return to these questions the
|
||
|
following afternoon.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER * Core of Workshop concerns preparation and production of
|
||
|
materials * Special challenge in conversion of textual materials *
|
||
|
Quality versus quantity * Do the several groups represented share common
|
||
|
interests? *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Carl FLEISCHHAUER, coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress,
|
||
|
emphasized that he would attempt to represent the people who perform some
|
||
|
of the work of converting or preparing materials and that the core of
|
||
|
the Workshop had to do with preparation and production. FLEISCHHAUER
|
||
|
then drew a distinction between the long term, when many things would be
|
||
|
available and connected in the ways that GIFFORD described, and the short
|
||
|
term, in which AM not only has wrestled with the issue of what is the
|
||
|
best course to pursue but also has faced a variety of technical
|
||
|
challenges.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER remarked AM's endeavors to deal with a wide range of library
|
||
|
formats, such as motion picture collections, sound-recording collections,
|
||
|
and pictorial collections of various sorts, especially collections of
|
||
|
photographs. In the course of these efforts, AM kept coming back to
|
||
|
textual materials--manuscripts or rare printed matter, bound materials,
|
||
|
etc. Text posed the greatest conversion challenge of all. Thus, the
|
||
|
genesis of the Workshop, which reflects the problems faced by AM. These
|
||
|
problems include physical problems. For example, those in the library
|
||
|
and archive business deal with collections made up of fragile and rare
|
||
|
manuscript items, bound materials, especially the notoriously brittle
|
||
|
bound materials of the late nineteenth century. These are precious
|
||
|
cultural artifacts, however, as well as interesting sources of
|
||
|
information, and LC desires to retain and conserve them. AM needs to
|
||
|
handle things without damaging them. Guillotining a book to run it
|
||
|
through a sheet feeder must be avoided at all costs.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Beyond physical problems, issues pertaining to quality arose. For
|
||
|
example, the desire to provide users with a searchable text is affected
|
||
|
by the question of acceptable level of accuracy. One hundred percent
|
||
|
accuracy is tremendously expensive. On the other hand, the output of
|
||
|
optical character recognition (OCR) can be tremendously inaccurate.
|
||
|
Although AM has attempted to find a middle ground, uncertainty persists
|
||
|
as to whether or not it has discovered the right solution.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Questions of quality arose concerning images as well. FLEISCHHAUER
|
||
|
contrasted the extremely high level of quality of the digital images in
|
||
|
the Cornell Xerox Project with AM's efforts to provide a browse-quality
|
||
|
or access-quality image, as opposed to an archival or preservation image.
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER therefore welcomed the opportunity to compare notes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER observed in passing that conversations he had had about
|
||
|
networks have begun to signal that for various forms of media a
|
||
|
determination may be made that there is a browse-quality item, or a
|
||
|
distribution-and-access-quality item that may coexist in some systems
|
||
|
with a higher quality archival item that would be inconvenient to send
|
||
|
through the network because of its size. FLEISCHHAUER referred, of
|
||
|
course, to images more than to searchable text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As AM considered those questions, several conceptual issues arose: ought
|
||
|
AM occasionally to reproduce materials entirely through an image set, at
|
||
|
other times, entirely through a text set, and in some cases, a mix?
|
||
|
There probably would be times when the historical authenticity of an
|
||
|
artifact would require that its image be used. An image might be
|
||
|
desirable as a recourse for users if one could not provide 100-percent
|
||
|
accurate text. Again, AM wondered, as a practical matter, if a
|
||
|
distinction could be drawn between rare printed matter that might exist
|
||
|
in multiple collections--that is, in ten or fifteen libraries. In such
|
||
|
cases, the need for perfect reproduction would be less than for unique
|
||
|
items. Implicit in his remarks, FLEISCHHAUER conceded, was the admission
|
||
|
that AM has been tilting strongly towards quantity and drawing back a
|
||
|
little from perfect quality. That is, it seemed to AM that society would
|
||
|
be better served if more things were distributed by LC--even if they were
|
||
|
not quite perfect--than if fewer things, perfectly represented, were
|
||
|
distributed. This was stated as a proposition to be tested, with
|
||
|
responses to be gathered from users.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In thinking about issues related to reproduction of materials and seeing
|
||
|
other people engaged in parallel activities, AM deemed it useful to
|
||
|
convene a conference. Hence, the Workshop. FLEISCHHAUER thereupon
|
||
|
surveyed the several groups represented: 1) the world of images (image
|
||
|
users and image makers); 2) the world of text and scholarship and, within
|
||
|
this group, those concerned with language--FLEISCHHAUER confessed to finding
|
||
|
delightful irony in the fact that some of the most advanced thinkers on
|
||
|
computerized texts are those dealing with ancient Greek and Roman materials;
|
||
|
3) the network world; and 4) the general world of library science, which
|
||
|
includes people interested in preservation and cataloging.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER concluded his remarks with special thanks to the David and
|
||
|
Lucile Packard Foundation for its support of the meeting, the American
|
||
|
Memory group, the Office for Scholarly Programs, the National
|
||
|
Demonstration Lab, and the Office of Special Events. He expressed the
|
||
|
hope that David Woodley Packard might be able to attend, noting that
|
||
|
Packard's work and the work of the foundation had sponsored a number of
|
||
|
projects in the text area.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION I. CONTENT IN A NEW FORM: WHO WILL USE IT AND WHAT WILL THEY DO?
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DALY * Acknowledgements * A new Latin authors disk * Effects of the new
|
||
|
technology on previous methods of research *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Serving as moderator, James DALY acknowledged the generosity of all the
|
||
|
presenters for giving of their time, counsel, and patience in planning
|
||
|
the Workshop, as well as of members of the American Memory project and
|
||
|
other Library of Congress staff, and the David and Lucile Packard
|
||
|
Foundation and its executive director, Colburn S. Wilbur.
|
||
|
|
||
|
DALY then recounted his visit in March to the Center for Electronic Texts
|
||
|
in the Humanities (CETH) and the Department of Classics at Rutgers
|
||
|
University, where an old friend, Lowell Edmunds, introduced him to the
|
||
|
department's IBYCUS scholarly personal computer, and, in particular, the
|
||
|
new Latin CD-ROM, containing, among other things, almost all classical
|
||
|
Latin literary texts through A.D. 200. Packard Humanities Institute
|
||
|
(PHI), Los Altos, California, released this disk late in 1991, with a
|
||
|
nominal triennial licensing fee.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Playing with the disk for an hour or so at Rutgers brought home to DALY
|
||
|
at once the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous
|
||
|
methods of research. Had this disk been available two or three years
|
||
|
earlier, DALY contended, when he was engaged in preparing a commentary on
|
||
|
Book 10 of Virgil's Aeneid for Cambridge University Press, he would not
|
||
|
have required a forty-eight-square-foot table on which to spread the
|
||
|
numerous, most frequently consulted items, including some ten or twelve
|
||
|
concordances to key Latin authors, an almost equal number of lexica to
|
||
|
authors who lacked concordances, and where either lexica or concordances
|
||
|
were lacking, numerous editions of authors antedating and postdating Virgil.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Nor, when checking each of the average six to seven words contained in
|
||
|
the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or
|
||
|
other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious
|
||
|
mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and
|
||
|
editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often the
|
||
|
Milton S. Eisenhower Library at the Johns Hopkins University to consult
|
||
|
the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Instead of devoting countless hours, or
|
||
|
the bulk of his research time, to gathering data concerning Virgil's use
|
||
|
of words, DALY--now freed by PHI's Latin authors disk from the
|
||
|
tyrannical, yet in some ways paradoxically happy scholarly drudgery--
|
||
|
would have been able to devote that same bulk of time to analyzing and
|
||
|
interpreting Virgilian verbal usage.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Citing Theodore Brunner, Gregory Crane, Elli MYLONAS, and Avra MICHELSON,
|
||
|
DALY argued that this reversal in his style of work, made possible by the
|
||
|
new technology, would perhaps have resulted in better, more productive
|
||
|
research. Indeed, even in the course of his browsing the Latin authors
|
||
|
disk at Rutgers, its powerful search, retrieval, and highlighting
|
||
|
capabilities suggested to him several new avenues of research into
|
||
|
Virgil's use of sound effects. This anecdotal account, DALY maintained,
|
||
|
may serve to illustrate in part the sudden and radical transformation
|
||
|
being wrought in the ways scholars work.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
MICHELSON * Elements related to scholarship and technology * Electronic
|
||
|
texts within the context of broader trends within information technology
|
||
|
and scholarly communication * Evaluation of the prospects for the use of
|
||
|
electronic texts * Relationship of electronic texts to processes of
|
||
|
scholarly communication in humanities research * New exchange formats
|
||
|
created by scholars * Projects initiated to increase scholarly access to
|
||
|
converted text * Trend toward making electronic resources available
|
||
|
through research and education networks * Changes taking place in
|
||
|
scholarly communication among humanities scholars * Network-mediated
|
||
|
scholarship transforming traditional scholarly practices * Key
|
||
|
information technology trends affecting the conduct of scholarly
|
||
|
communication over the next decade * The trend toward end-user computing
|
||
|
* The trend toward greater connectivity * Effects of these trends * Key
|
||
|
transformations taking place * Summary of principal arguments *
|
||
|
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Avra MICHELSON, Archival Research and Evaluation Staff, National Archives
|
||
|
and Records Administration (NARA), argued that establishing who will use
|
||
|
electronic texts and what they will use them for involves a consideration
|
||
|
of both information technology and scholarship trends. This
|
||
|
consideration includes several elements related to scholarship and
|
||
|
technology: 1) the key trends in information technology that are most
|
||
|
relevant to scholarship; 2) the key trends in the use of currently
|
||
|
available technology by scholars in the nonscientific community; and 3)
|
||
|
the relationship between these two very distinct but interrelated trends.
|
||
|
The investment in understanding this relationship being made by
|
||
|
information providers, technologists, and public policy developers, as
|
||
|
well as by scholars themselves, seems to be pervasive and growing,
|
||
|
MICHELSON contended. She drew on collaborative work with Jeff Rothenberg
|
||
|
on the scholarly use of technology.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MICHELSON sought to place the phenomenon of electronic texts within the
|
||
|
context of broader trends within information technology and scholarly
|
||
|
communication. She argued that electronic texts are of most use to
|
||
|
researchers to the extent that the researchers' working context (i.e.,
|
||
|
their relevant bibliographic sources, collegial feedback, analytic tools,
|
||
|
notes, drafts, etc.), along with their field's primary and secondary
|
||
|
sources, also is accessible in electronic form and can be integrated in
|
||
|
ways that are unique to the on-line environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Evaluation of the prospects for the use of electronic texts includes two
|
||
|
elements: 1) an examination of the ways in which researchers currently
|
||
|
are using electronic texts along with other electronic resources, and 2)
|
||
|
an analysis of key information technology trends that are affecting the
|
||
|
long-term conduct of scholarly communication. MICHELSON limited her
|
||
|
discussion of the use of electronic texts to the practices of humanists
|
||
|
and noted that the scientific community was outside the panel's overview.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MICHELSON examined the nature of the current relationship of electronic
|
||
|
texts in particular, and electronic resources in general, to what she
|
||
|
maintained were, essentially, five processes of scholarly communication
|
||
|
in humanities research. Researchers 1) identify sources, 2) communicate
|
||
|
with their colleagues, 3) interpret and analyze data, 4) disseminate
|
||
|
their research findings, and 5) prepare curricula to instruct the next
|
||
|
generation of scholars and students. This examination would produce a
|
||
|
clearer understanding of the synergy among these five processes that
|
||
|
fuels the tendency of the use of electronic resources for one process to
|
||
|
stimulate its use for other processes of scholarly communication.
|
||
|
|
||
|
For the first process of scholarly communication, the identification of
|
||
|
sources, MICHELSON remarked the opportunity scholars now enjoy to
|
||
|
supplement traditional word-of-mouth searches for sources among their
|
||
|
colleagues with new forms of electronic searching. So, for example,
|
||
|
instead of having to visit the library, researchers are able to explore
|
||
|
descriptions of holdings in their offices. Furthermore, if their own
|
||
|
institutions' holdings prove insufficient, scholars can access more than
|
||
|
200 major American library catalogues over Internet, including the
|
||
|
universities of California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
|
||
|
Direct access to the bibliographic databases offers intellectual
|
||
|
empowerment to scholars by presenting a comprehensive means of browsing
|
||
|
through libraries from their homes and offices at their convenience.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The second process of communication involves communication among
|
||
|
scholars. Beyond the most common methods of communication, scholars are
|
||
|
using E-mail and a variety of new electronic communications formats
|
||
|
derived from it for further academic interchange. E-mail exchanges are
|
||
|
growing at an astonishing rate, reportedly 15 percent a month. They
|
||
|
currently constitute approximately half the traffic on research and
|
||
|
education networks. Moreover, the global spread of E-mail has been so
|
||
|
rapid that it is now possible for American scholars to use it to
|
||
|
communicate with colleagues in close to 140 other countries.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Other new exchange formats created by scholars and operating on Internet
|
||
|
include more than 700 conferences, with about 80 percent of these devoted
|
||
|
to topics in the social sciences and humanities. The rate of growth of
|
||
|
these scholarly electronic conferences also is astonishing. From l990 to
|
||
|
l991, 200 new conferences were identified on Internet. From October 1991
|
||
|
to June 1992, an additional 150 conferences in the social sciences and
|
||
|
humanities were added to this directory of listings. Scholars have
|
||
|
established conferences in virtually every field, within every different
|
||
|
discipline. For example, there are currently close to 600 active social
|
||
|
science and humanities conferences on topics such as art and
|
||
|
architecture, ethnomusicology, folklore, Japanese culture, medical
|
||
|
education, and gifted and talented education. The appeal to scholars of
|
||
|
communicating through these conferences is that, unlike any other medium,
|
||
|
electronic conferences today provide a forum for global communication
|
||
|
with peers at the front end of the research process.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Interpretation and analysis of sources constitutes the third process of
|
||
|
scholarly communication that MICHELSON discussed in terms of texts and
|
||
|
textual resources. The methods used to analyze sources fall somewhere on
|
||
|
a continuum from quantitative analysis to qualitative analysis.
|
||
|
Typically, evidence is culled and evaluated using methods drawn from both
|
||
|
ends of this continuum. At one end, quantitative analysis involves the
|
||
|
use of mathematical processes such as a count of frequencies and
|
||
|
distributions of occurrences or, on a higher level, regression analysis.
|
||
|
At the other end of the continuum, qualitative analysis typically
|
||
|
involves nonmathematical processes oriented toward language
|
||
|
interpretation or the building of theory. Aspects of this work involve
|
||
|
the processing--either manual or computational--of large and sometimes
|
||
|
massive amounts of textual sources, although the use of nontextual
|
||
|
sources as evidence, such as photographs, sound recordings, film footage,
|
||
|
and artifacts, is significant as well.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Scholars have discovered that many of the methods of interpretation and
|
||
|
analysis that are related to both quantitative and qualitative methods
|
||
|
are processes that can be performed by computers. For example, computers
|
||
|
can count. They can count brush strokes used in a Rembrandt painting or
|
||
|
perform regression analysis for understanding cause and effect. By means
|
||
|
of advanced technologies, computers can recognize patterns, analyze text,
|
||
|
and model concepts. Furthermore, computers can complete these processes
|
||
|
faster with more sources and with greater precision than scholars who
|
||
|
must rely on manual interpretation of data. But if scholars are to use
|
||
|
computers for these processes, source materials must be in a form
|
||
|
amenable to computer-assisted analysis. For this reason many scholars,
|
||
|
once they have identified the sources that are key to their research, are
|
||
|
converting them to machine-readable form. Thus, a representative example
|
||
|
of the numerous textual conversion projects organized by scholars around
|
||
|
the world in recent years to support computational text analysis is the
|
||
|
TLG, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. This project is devoted to
|
||
|
converting the extant ancient texts of classical Greece. (Editor's note:
|
||
|
according to the TLG Newsletter of May l992, TLG was in use in thirty-two
|
||
|
different countries. This figure updates MICHELSON's previous count by one.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
The scholars performing these conversions have been asked to recognize
|
||
|
that the electronic sources they are converting for one use possess value
|
||
|
for other research purposes as well. As a result, during the past few
|
||
|
years, humanities scholars have initiated a number of projects to
|
||
|
increase scholarly access to converted text. So, for example, the Text
|
||
|
Encoding Initiative (TEI), about which more is said later in the program,
|
||
|
was established as an effort by scholars to determine standard elements
|
||
|
and methods for encoding machine-readable text for electronic exchange.
|
||
|
In a second effort to facilitate the sharing of converted text, scholars
|
||
|
have created a new institution, the Center for Electronic Texts in the
|
||
|
Humanities (CETH). The center estimates that there are 8,000 series of
|
||
|
source texts in the humanities that have been converted to
|
||
|
machine-readable form worldwide. CETH is undertaking an international
|
||
|
search for converted text in the humanities, compiling it into an
|
||
|
electronic library, and preparing bibliographic descriptions of the
|
||
|
sources for the Research Libraries Information Network's (RLIN)
|
||
|
machine-readable data file. The library profession has begun to initiate
|
||
|
large conversion projects as well, such as American Memory.
|
||
|
|
||
|
While scholars have been making converted text available to one another,
|
||
|
typically on disk or on CD-ROM, the clear trend is toward making these
|
||
|
resources available through research and education networks. Thus, the
|
||
|
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language
|
||
|
(ARTFL) and the Dante Project are already available on Internet.
|
||
|
MICHELSON summarized this section on interpretation and analysis by
|
||
|
noting that: 1) increasing numbers of humanities scholars in the library
|
||
|
community are recognizing the importance to the advancement of
|
||
|
scholarship of retrospective conversion of source materials in the arts
|
||
|
and humanities; and 2) there is a growing realization that making the
|
||
|
sources available on research and education networks maximizes their
|
||
|
usefulness for the analysis performed by humanities scholars.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The fourth process of scholarly communication is dissemination of
|
||
|
research findings, that is, publication. Scholars are using existing
|
||
|
research and education networks to engineer a new type of publication:
|
||
|
scholarly-controlled journals that are electronically produced and
|
||
|
disseminated. Although such journals are still emerging as a
|
||
|
communication format, their number has grown, from approximately twelve
|
||
|
to thirty-six during the past year (July 1991 to June 1992). Most of
|
||
|
these electronic scholarly journals are devoted to topics in the
|
||
|
humanities. As with network conferences, scholarly enthusiasm for these
|
||
|
electronic journals stems from the medium's unique ability to advance
|
||
|
scholarship in a way that no other medium can do by supporting global
|
||
|
feedback and interchange, practically in real time, early in the research
|
||
|
process. Beyond scholarly journals, MICHELSON remarked the delivery of
|
||
|
commercial full-text products, such as articles in professional journals,
|
||
|
newsletters, magazines, wire services, and reference sources. These are
|
||
|
being delivered via on-line local library catalogues, especially through
|
||
|
CD-ROMs. Furthermore, according to MICHELSON, there is general optimism
|
||
|
that the copyright and fees issues impeding the delivery of full text on
|
||
|
existing research and education networks soon will be resolved.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The final process of scholarly communication is curriculum development
|
||
|
and instruction, and this involves the use of computer information
|
||
|
technologies in two areas. The first is the development of
|
||
|
computer-oriented instructional tools, which includes simulations,
|
||
|
multimedia applications, and computer tools that are used to assist in
|
||
|
the analysis of sources in the classroom, etc. The Perseus Project, a
|
||
|
database that provides a multimedia curriculum on classical Greek
|
||
|
civilization, is a good example of the way in which entire curricula are
|
||
|
being recast using information technologies. It is anticipated that the
|
||
|
current difficulty in exchanging electronically computer-based
|
||
|
instructional software, which in turn makes it difficult for one scholar
|
||
|
to build upon the work of others, will be resolved before too long.
|
||
|
Stand-alone curricular applications that involve electronic text will be
|
||
|
sharable through networks, reinforcing their significance as intellectual
|
||
|
products as well as instructional tools.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The second aspect of electronic learning involves the use of research and
|
||
|
education networks for distance education programs. Such programs
|
||
|
interactively link teachers with students in geographically scattered
|
||
|
locations and rely on the availability of electronic instructional
|
||
|
resources. Distance education programs are gaining wide appeal among
|
||
|
state departments of education because of their demonstrated capacity to
|
||
|
bring advanced specialized course work and an array of experts to many
|
||
|
classrooms. A recent report found that at least 32 states operated at
|
||
|
least one statewide network for education in 1991, with networks under
|
||
|
development in many of the remaining states.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MICHELSON summarized this section by noting two striking changes taking
|
||
|
place in scholarly communication among humanities scholars. First is the
|
||
|
extent to which electronic text in particular, and electronic resources
|
||
|
in general, are being infused into each of the five processes described
|
||
|
above. As mentioned earlier, there is a certain synergy at work here.
|
||
|
The use of electronic resources for one process tends to stimulate its
|
||
|
use for other processes, because the chief course of movement is toward a
|
||
|
comprehensive on-line working context for humanities scholars that
|
||
|
includes on-line availability of key bibliographies, scholarly feedback,
|
||
|
sources, analytical tools, and publications. MICHELSON noted further
|
||
|
that the movement toward a comprehensive on-line working context for
|
||
|
humanities scholars is not new. In fact, it has been underway for more
|
||
|
than forty years in the humanities, since Father Roberto Busa began
|
||
|
developing an electronic concordance of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas
|
||
|
in 1949. What we are witnessing today, MICHELSON contended, is not the
|
||
|
beginning of this on-line transition but, for at least some humanities
|
||
|
scholars, the turning point in the transition from a print to an
|
||
|
electronic working context. Coinciding with the on-line transition, the
|
||
|
second striking change is the extent to which research and education
|
||
|
networks are becoming the new medium of scholarly communication. The
|
||
|
existing Internet and the pending National Education and Research Network
|
||
|
(NREN) represent the new meeting ground where scholars are going for
|
||
|
bibliographic information, scholarly dialogue and feedback, the most
|
||
|
current publications in their field, and high-level educational
|
||
|
offerings. Traditional scholarly practices are undergoing tremendous
|
||
|
transformations as a result of the emergence and growing prominence of
|
||
|
what is called network-mediated scholarship.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MICHELSON next turned to the second element of the framework she proposed
|
||
|
at the outset of her talk for evaluating the prospects for electronic
|
||
|
text, namely the key information technology trends affecting the conduct
|
||
|
of scholarly communication over the next decade: 1) end-user computing
|
||
|
and 2) connectivity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
End-user computing means that the person touching the keyboard, or
|
||
|
performing computations, is the same as the person who initiates or
|
||
|
consumes the computation. The emergence of personal computers, along
|
||
|
with a host of other forces, such as ubiquitous computing, advances in
|
||
|
interface design, and the on-line transition, is prompting the consumers
|
||
|
of computation to do their own computing, and is thus rendering obsolete
|
||
|
the traditional distinction between end users and ultimate users.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The trend toward end-user computing is significant to consideration of
|
||
|
the prospects for electronic texts because it means that researchers are
|
||
|
becoming more adept at doing their own computations and, thus, more
|
||
|
competent in the use of electronic media. By avoiding programmer
|
||
|
intermediaries, computation is becoming central to the researcher's
|
||
|
thought process. This direct involvement in computing is changing the
|
||
|
researcher's perspective on the nature of research itself, that is, the
|
||
|
kinds of questions that can be posed, the analytical methodologies that
|
||
|
can be used, the types and amount of sources that are appropriate for
|
||
|
analyses, and the form in which findings are presented. The trend toward
|
||
|
end-user computing means that, increasingly, electronic media and
|
||
|
computation are being infused into all processes of humanities
|
||
|
scholarship, inspiring remarkable transformations in scholarly
|
||
|
communication.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The trend toward greater connectivity suggests that researchers are using
|
||
|
computation increasingly in network environments. Connectivity is
|
||
|
important to scholarship because it erases the distance that separates
|
||
|
students from teachers and scholars from their colleagues, while allowing
|
||
|
users to access remote databases, share information in many different
|
||
|
media, connect to their working context wherever they are, and
|
||
|
collaborate in all phases of research.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The combination of the trend toward end-user computing and the trend
|
||
|
toward connectivity suggests that the scholarly use of electronic
|
||
|
resources, already evident among some researchers, will soon become an
|
||
|
established feature of scholarship. The effects of these trends, along
|
||
|
with ongoing changes in scholarly practices, point to a future in which
|
||
|
humanities researchers will use computation and electronic communication
|
||
|
to help them formulate ideas, access sources, perform research,
|
||
|
collaborate with colleagues, seek peer review, publish and disseminate
|
||
|
results, and engage in many other professional and educational activities.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In summary, MICHELSON emphasized four points: 1) A portion of humanities
|
||
|
scholars already consider electronic texts the preferred format for
|
||
|
analysis and dissemination. 2) Scholars are using these electronic
|
||
|
texts, in conjunction with other electronic resources, in all the
|
||
|
processes of scholarly communication. 3) The humanities scholars'
|
||
|
working context is in the process of changing from print technology to
|
||
|
electronic technology, in many ways mirroring transformations that have
|
||
|
occurred or are occurring within the scientific community. 4) These
|
||
|
changes are occurring in conjunction with the development of a new
|
||
|
communication medium: research and education networks that are
|
||
|
characterized by their capacity to advance scholarship in a wholly unique
|
||
|
way.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MICHELSON also reiterated her three principal arguments: l) Electronic
|
||
|
texts are best understood in terms of the relationship to other
|
||
|
electronic resources and the growing prominence of network-mediated
|
||
|
scholarship. 2) The prospects for electronic texts lie in their capacity
|
||
|
to be integrated into the on-line network of electronic resources that
|
||
|
comprise the new working context for scholars. 3) Retrospective conversion
|
||
|
of portions of the scholarly record should be a key strategy as information
|
||
|
providers respond to changes in scholarly communication practices.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
VECCIA * AM's evaluation project and public users of electronic resources
|
||
|
* AM and its design * Site selection and evaluating the Macintosh
|
||
|
implementation of AM * Characteristics of the six public libraries
|
||
|
selected * Characteristics of AM's users in these libraries * Principal
|
||
|
ways AM is being used *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan VECCIA, team leader, and Joanne FREEMAN, associate coordinator,
|
||
|
American Memory, Library of Congress, gave a joint presentation. First,
|
||
|
by way of introduction, VECCIA explained her and FREEMAN's roles in
|
||
|
American Memory (AM). Serving principally as an observer, VECCIA has
|
||
|
assisted with the evaluation project of AM, placing AM collections in a
|
||
|
variety of different sites around the country and helping to organize and
|
||
|
implement that project. FREEMAN has been an associate coordinator of AM
|
||
|
and has been involved principally with the interpretative materials,
|
||
|
preparing some of the electronic exhibits and printed historical
|
||
|
information that accompanies AM and that is requested by users. VECCIA
|
||
|
and FREEMAN shared anecdotal observations concerning AM with public users
|
||
|
of electronic resources. Notwithstanding a fairly structured evaluation
|
||
|
in progress, both VECCIA and FREEMAN chose not to report on specifics in
|
||
|
terms of numbers, etc., because they felt it was too early in the
|
||
|
evaluation project to do so.
|
||
|
|
||
|
AM is an electronic archive of primary source materials from the Library
|
||
|
of Congress, selected collections representing a variety of formats--
|
||
|
photographs, graphic arts, recorded sound, motion pictures, broadsides,
|
||
|
and soon, pamphlets and books. In terms of the design of this system,
|
||
|
the interpretative exhibits have been kept separate from the primary
|
||
|
resources, with good reason. Accompanying this collection are printed
|
||
|
documentation and user guides, as well as guides that FREEMAN prepared for
|
||
|
teachers so that they may begin using the content of the system at once.
|
||
|
|
||
|
VECCIA described the evaluation project before talking about the public
|
||
|
users of AM, limiting her remarks to public libraries, because FREEMAN
|
||
|
would talk more specifically about schools from kindergarten to twelfth
|
||
|
grade (K-12). Having started in spring 1991, the evaluation currently
|
||
|
involves testing of the Macintosh implementation of AM. Since the
|
||
|
primary goal of this evaluation is to determine the most appropriate
|
||
|
audience or audiences for AM, very different sites were selected. This
|
||
|
makes evaluation difficult because of the varying degrees of technology
|
||
|
literacy among the sites. AM is situated in forty-four locations, of
|
||
|
which six are public libraries and sixteen are schools. Represented
|
||
|
among the schools are elementary, junior high, and high schools.
|
||
|
District offices also are involved in the evaluation, which will
|
||
|
conclude in summer 1993.
|
||
|
|
||
|
VECCIA focused the remainder of her talk on the six public libraries, one
|
||
|
of which doubles as a state library. They represent a range of
|
||
|
geographic areas and a range of demographic characteristics. For
|
||
|
example, three are located in urban settings, two in rural settings, and
|
||
|
one in a suburban setting. A range of technical expertise is to be found
|
||
|
among these facilities as well. For example, one is an "Apple library of
|
||
|
the future," while two others are rural one-room libraries--in one, AM
|
||
|
sits at the front desk next to a tractor manual.
|
||
|
|
||
|
All public libraries have been extremely enthusiastic, supportive, and
|
||
|
appreciative of the work that AM has been doing. VECCIA characterized
|
||
|
various users: Most users in public libraries describe themselves as
|
||
|
general readers; of the students who use AM in the public libraries,
|
||
|
those in fourth grade and above seem most interested. Public libraries
|
||
|
in rural sites tend to attract retired people, who have been highly
|
||
|
receptive to AM. Users tend to fall into two additional categories:
|
||
|
people interested in the content and historical connotations of these
|
||
|
primary resources, and those fascinated by the technology. The format
|
||
|
receiving the most comments has been motion pictures. The adult users in
|
||
|
public libraries are more comfortable with IBM computers, whereas young
|
||
|
people seem comfortable with either IBM or Macintosh, although most of
|
||
|
them seem to come from a Macintosh background. This same tendency is
|
||
|
found in the schools.
|
||
|
|
||
|
What kinds of things do users do with AM? In a public library there are
|
||
|
two main goals or ways that AM is being used: as an individual learning
|
||
|
tool, and as a leisure activity. Adult learning was one area that VECCIA
|
||
|
would highlight as a possible application for a tool such as AM. She
|
||
|
described a patron of a rural public library who comes in every day on
|
||
|
his lunch hour and literally reads AM, methodically going through the
|
||
|
collection image by image. At the end of his hour he makes an electronic
|
||
|
bookmark, puts it in his pocket, and returns to work. The next day he
|
||
|
comes in and resumes where he left off. Interestingly, this man had
|
||
|
never been in the library before he used AM. In another small, rural
|
||
|
library, the coordinator reports that AM is a popular activity for some
|
||
|
of the older, retired people in the community, who ordinarily would not
|
||
|
use "those things,"--computers. Another example of adult learning in
|
||
|
public libraries is book groups, one of which, in particular, is using AM
|
||
|
as part of its reading on industrialization, integration, and urbanization
|
||
|
in the early 1900s.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One library reports that a family is using AM to help educate their
|
||
|
children. In another instance, individuals from a local museum came in
|
||
|
to use AM to prepare an exhibit on toys of the past. These two examples
|
||
|
emphasize the mission of the public library as a cultural institution,
|
||
|
reaching out to people who do not have the same resources available to
|
||
|
those who live in a metropolitan area or have access to a major library.
|
||
|
One rural library reports that junior high school students in large
|
||
|
numbers came in one afternoon to use AM for entertainment. A number of
|
||
|
public libraries reported great interest among postcard collectors in the
|
||
|
Detroit collection, which was essentially a collection of images used on
|
||
|
postcards around the turn of the century. Train buffs are similarly
|
||
|
interested because that was a time of great interest in railroading.
|
||
|
People, it was found, relate to things that they know of firsthand. For
|
||
|
example, in both rural public libraries where AM was made available,
|
||
|
observers reported that the older people with personal remembrances of
|
||
|
the turn of the century were gravitating to the Detroit collection.
|
||
|
These examples served to underscore MICHELSON's observation re the
|
||
|
integration of electronic tools and ideas--that people learn best when
|
||
|
the material relates to something they know.
|
||
|
|
||
|
VECCIA made the final point that in many cases AM serves as a
|
||
|
public-relations tool for the public libraries that are testing it. In
|
||
|
one case, AM is being used as a vehicle to secure additional funding for
|
||
|
the library. In another case, AM has served as an inspiration to the
|
||
|
staff of a major local public library in the South to think about ways to
|
||
|
make its own collection of photographs more accessible to the public.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
FREEMAN * AM and archival electronic resources in a school environment *
|
||
|
Questions concerning context * Questions concerning the electronic format
|
||
|
itself * Computer anxiety * Access and availability of the system *
|
||
|
Hardware * Strengths gained through the use of archival resources in
|
||
|
schools *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Reiterating an observation made by VECCIA, that AM is an archival
|
||
|
resource made up of primary materials with very little interpretation,
|
||
|
FREEMAN stated that the project has attempted to bridge the gap between
|
||
|
these bare primary materials and a school environment, and in that cause
|
||
|
has created guided introductions to AM collections. Loud demand from the
|
||
|
educational community, chiefly from teachers working with the upper
|
||
|
grades of elementary school through high school, greeted the announcement
|
||
|
that AM would be tested around the country.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FREEMAN reported not only on what was learned about AM in a school
|
||
|
environment, but also on several universal questions that were raised
|
||
|
concerning archival electronic resources in schools. She discussed
|
||
|
several strengths of this type of material in a school environment as
|
||
|
opposed to a highly structured resource that offers a limited number of
|
||
|
paths to follow.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FREEMAN first raised several questions about using AM in a school
|
||
|
environment. There is often some difficulty in developing a sense of
|
||
|
what the system contains. Many students sit down at a computer resource
|
||
|
and assume that, because AM comes from the Library of Congress, all of
|
||
|
American history is now at their fingertips. As a result of that sort of
|
||
|
mistaken judgment, some students are known to conclude that AM contains
|
||
|
nothing of use to them when they look for one or two things and do not
|
||
|
find them. It is difficult to discover that middle ground where one has
|
||
|
a sense of what the system contains. Some students grope toward the idea
|
||
|
of an archive, a new idea to them, since they have not previously
|
||
|
experienced what it means to have access to a vast body of somewhat
|
||
|
random information.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Other questions raised by FREEMAN concerned the electronic format itself.
|
||
|
For instance, in a school environment it is often difficult both for
|
||
|
teachers and students to gain a sense of what it is they are viewing.
|
||
|
They understand that it is a visual image, but they do not necessarily
|
||
|
know that it is a postcard from the turn of the century, a panoramic
|
||
|
photograph, or even machine-readable text of an eighteenth-century
|
||
|
broadside, a twentieth-century printed book, or a nineteenth-century
|
||
|
diary. That distinction is often difficult for people in a school
|
||
|
environment to grasp. Because of that, it occasionally becomes difficult
|
||
|
to draw conclusions from what one is viewing.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FREEMAN also noted the obvious fear of the computer, which constitutes a
|
||
|
difficulty in using an electronic resource. Though students in general
|
||
|
did not suffer from this anxiety, several older students feared that they
|
||
|
were computer-illiterate, an assumption that became self-fulfilling when
|
||
|
they searched for something but failed to find it. FREEMAN said she
|
||
|
believed that some teachers also fear computer resources, because they
|
||
|
believe they lack complete control. FREEMAN related the example of
|
||
|
teachers shooing away students because it was not their time to use the
|
||
|
system. This was a case in which the situation had to be extremely
|
||
|
structured so that the teachers would not feel that they had lost their
|
||
|
grasp on what the system contained.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A final question raised by FREEMAN concerned access and availability of
|
||
|
the system. She noted the occasional existence of a gap in communication
|
||
|
between school librarians and teachers. Often AM sits in a school
|
||
|
library and the librarian is the person responsible for monitoring the
|
||
|
system. Teachers do not always take into their world new library
|
||
|
resources about which the librarian is excited. Indeed, at the sites
|
||
|
where AM had been used most effectively within a library, the librarian
|
||
|
was required to go to specific teachers and instruct them in its use. As
|
||
|
a result, several AM sites will have in-service sessions over a summer,
|
||
|
in the hope that perhaps, with a more individualized link, teachers will
|
||
|
be more likely to use the resource.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A related issue in the school context concerned the number of
|
||
|
workstations available at any one location. Centralization of equipment
|
||
|
at the district level, with teachers invited to download things and walk
|
||
|
away with them, proved unsuccessful because the hours these offices were
|
||
|
open were also school hours.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Another issue was hardware. As VECCIA observed, a range of sites exists,
|
||
|
some technologically advanced and others essentially acquiring their
|
||
|
first computer for the primary purpose of using it in conjunction with
|
||
|
AM's testing. Users at technologically sophisticated sites want even
|
||
|
more sophisticated hardware, so that they can perform even more
|
||
|
sophisticated tasks with the materials in AM. But once they acquire a
|
||
|
newer piece of hardware, they must learn how to use that also; at an
|
||
|
unsophisticated site it takes an extremely long time simply to become
|
||
|
accustomed to the computer, not to mention the program offered with the
|
||
|
computer. All of these small issues raise one large question, namely,
|
||
|
are systems like AM truly rewarding in a school environment, or do they
|
||
|
simply act as innovative toys that do little more than spark interest?
|
||
|
|
||
|
FREEMAN contended that the evaluation project has revealed several strengths
|
||
|
that were gained through the use of archival resources in schools, including:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Psychic rewards from using AM as a vast, rich database, with
|
||
|
teachers assigning various projects to students--oral presentations,
|
||
|
written reports, a documentary, a turn-of-the-century newspaper--
|
||
|
projects that start with the materials in AM but are completed using
|
||
|
other resources; AM thus is used as a research tool in conjunction
|
||
|
with other electronic resources, as well as with books and items in
|
||
|
the library where the system is set up.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Students are acquiring computer literacy in a humanities context.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* This sort of system is overcoming the isolation between disciplines
|
||
|
that often exists in schools. For example, many English teachers are
|
||
|
requiring their students to write papers on historical topics
|
||
|
represented in AM. Numerous teachers have reported that their
|
||
|
students are learning critical thinking skills using the system.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* On a broader level, AM is introducing primary materials, not only
|
||
|
to students but also to teachers, in an environment where often
|
||
|
simply none exist--an exciting thing for the students because it
|
||
|
helps them learn to conduct research, to interpret, and to draw
|
||
|
their own conclusions. In learning to conduct research and what it
|
||
|
means, students are motivated to seek knowledge. That relates to
|
||
|
another positive outcome--a high level of personal involvement of
|
||
|
students with the materials in this system and greater motivation to
|
||
|
conduct their own research and draw their own conclusions.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Perhaps the most ironic strength of these kinds of archival
|
||
|
electronic resources is that many of the teachers AM interviewed
|
||
|
were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary
|
||
|
materials but for unstructured primary materials. These would, they
|
||
|
thought, foster personally motivated research, exploration, and
|
||
|
excitement in their students. Indeed, these materials have done
|
||
|
just that. Ironically, however, this lack of structure produces
|
||
|
some of the confusion to which the newness of these kinds of
|
||
|
resources may also contribute. The key to effective use of archival
|
||
|
products in a school environment is a clear, effective introduction
|
||
|
to the system and to what it contains.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Nothing known, quantitatively, about the number of
|
||
|
humanities scholars who must see the original versus those who would
|
||
|
settle for an edited transcript, or about the ways in which humanities
|
||
|
scholars are using information technology * Firm conclusions concerning
|
||
|
the manner and extent of the use of supporting materials in print
|
||
|
provided by AM to await completion of evaluative study * A listener's
|
||
|
reflections on additional applications of electronic texts * Role of
|
||
|
electronic resources in teaching elementary research skills to students *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the discussion that followed the presentations by MICHELSON,
|
||
|
VECCIA, and FREEMAN, additional points emerged.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LESK asked if MICHELSON could give any quantitative estimate of the
|
||
|
number of humanities scholars who must see or want to see the original,
|
||
|
or the best possible version of the material, versus those who typically
|
||
|
would settle for an edited transcript. While unable to provide a figure,
|
||
|
she offered her impressions as an archivist who has done some reference
|
||
|
work and has discussed this issue with other archivists who perform
|
||
|
reference, that those who use archives and those who use primary sources
|
||
|
for what would be considered very high-level scholarly research, as
|
||
|
opposed to, say, undergraduate papers, were few in number, especially
|
||
|
given the public interest in using primary sources to conduct
|
||
|
genealogical or avocational research and the kind of professional
|
||
|
research done by people in private industry or the federal government.
|
||
|
More important in MICHELSON's view was that, quantitatively, nothing is
|
||
|
known about the ways in which, for example, humanities scholars are using
|
||
|
information technology. No studies exist to offer guidance in creating
|
||
|
strategies. The most recent study was conducted in 1985 by the American
|
||
|
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and what it showed was that 50
|
||
|
percent of humanities scholars at that time were using computers. That
|
||
|
constitutes the extent of our knowledge.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning AM's strategy for orienting people toward the scope of
|
||
|
electronic resources, FREEMAN could offer no hard conclusions at this
|
||
|
point, because she and her colleagues were still waiting to see,
|
||
|
particularly in the schools, what has been made of their efforts. Within
|
||
|
the system, however, AM has provided what are called electronic exhibits-
|
||
|
-such as introductions to time periods and materials--and these are
|
||
|
intended to offer a student user a sense of what a broadside is and what
|
||
|
it might tell her or him. But FREEMAN conceded that the project staff
|
||
|
would have to talk with students next year, after teachers have had a
|
||
|
summer to use the materials, and attempt to discover what the students
|
||
|
were learning from the materials. In addition, FREEMAN described
|
||
|
supporting materials in print provided by AM at the request of local
|
||
|
teachers during a meeting held at LC. These included time lines,
|
||
|
bibliographies, and other materials that could be reproduced on a
|
||
|
photocopier in a classroom. Teachers could walk away with and use these,
|
||
|
and in this way gain a better understanding of the contents. But again,
|
||
|
reaching firm conclusions concerning the manner and extent of their use
|
||
|
would have to wait until next year.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As to the changes she saw occurring at the National Archives and Records
|
||
|
Administration (NARA) as a result of the increasing emphasis on
|
||
|
technology in scholarly research, MICHELSON stated that NARA at this
|
||
|
point was absorbing the report by her and Jeff Rothenberg addressing
|
||
|
strategies for the archival profession in general, although not for the
|
||
|
National Archives specifically. NARA is just beginning to establish its
|
||
|
role and what it can do. In terms of changes and initiatives that NARA
|
||
|
can take, no clear response could be given at this time.
|
||
|
|
||
|
GREENFIELD remarked two trends mentioned in the session. Reflecting on
|
||
|
DALY's opening comments on how he could have used a Latin collection of
|
||
|
text in an electronic form, he said that at first he thought most scholars
|
||
|
would be unwilling to do that. But as he thought of that in terms of the
|
||
|
original meaning of research--that is, having already mastered these texts,
|
||
|
researching them for critical and comparative purposes--for the first time,
|
||
|
the electronic format made a lot of sense. GREENFIELD could envision
|
||
|
growing numbers of scholars learning the new technologies for that very
|
||
|
aspect of their scholarship and for convenience's sake.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Listening to VECCIA and FREEMAN, GREENFIELD thought of an additional
|
||
|
application of electronic texts. He realized that AM could be used as a
|
||
|
guide to lead someone to original sources. Students cannot be expected
|
||
|
to have mastered these sources, things they have never known about
|
||
|
before. Thus, AM is leading them, in theory, to a vast body of
|
||
|
information and giving them a superficial overview of it, enabling them
|
||
|
to select parts of it. GREENFIELD asked if any evidence exists that this
|
||
|
resource will indeed teach the new user, the K-12 students, how to do
|
||
|
research. Scholars already know how to do research and are applying
|
||
|
these new tools. But he wondered why students would go beyond picking
|
||
|
out things that were most exciting to them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FREEMAN conceded the correctness of GREENFIELD's observation as applied
|
||
|
to a school environment. The risk is that a student would sit down at a
|
||
|
system, play with it, find some things of interest, and then walk away.
|
||
|
But in the relatively controlled situation of a school library, much will
|
||
|
depend on the instructions a teacher or a librarian gives a student. She
|
||
|
viewed the situation not as one of fine-tuning research skills but of
|
||
|
involving students at a personal level in understanding and researching
|
||
|
things. Given the guidance one can receive at school, it then becomes
|
||
|
possible to teach elementary research skills to students, which in fact
|
||
|
one particular librarian said she was teaching her fifth graders.
|
||
|
FREEMAN concluded that introducing the idea of following one's own path
|
||
|
of inquiry, which is essentially what research entails, involves more
|
||
|
than teaching specific skills. To these comments VECCIA added the
|
||
|
observation that the individual teacher and the use of a creative
|
||
|
resource, rather than AM itself, seemed to make the key difference.
|
||
|
Some schools and some teachers are making excellent use of the nature
|
||
|
of critical thinking and teaching skills, she said.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concurring with these remarks, DALY closed the session with the thought that
|
||
|
the more that producers produced for teachers and for scholars to use with
|
||
|
their students, the more successful their electronic products would prove.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION II. SHOW AND TELL
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jacqueline HESS, director, National Demonstration Laboratory, served as
|
||
|
moderator of the "show-and-tell" session. She noted that a
|
||
|
question-and-answer period would follow each presentation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
MYLONAS * Overview and content of Perseus * Perseus' primary materials
|
||
|
exist in a system-independent, archival form * A concession * Textual
|
||
|
aspects of Perseus * Tools to use with the Greek text * Prepared indices
|
||
|
and full-text searches in Perseus * English-Greek word search leads to
|
||
|
close study of words and concepts * Navigating Perseus by tracing down
|
||
|
indices * Using the iconography to perform research *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Elli MYLONAS, managing editor, Perseus Project, Harvard University, first
|
||
|
gave an overview of Perseus, a large, collaborative effort based at
|
||
|
Harvard University but with contributors and collaborators located at
|
||
|
numerous universities and colleges in the United States (e.g., Bowdoin,
|
||
|
Maryland, Pomona, Chicago, Virginia). Funded primarily by the
|
||
|
Annenberg/CPB Project, with additional funding from Apple, Harvard, and
|
||
|
the Packard Humanities Institute, among others, Perseus is a multimedia,
|
||
|
hypertextual database for teaching and research on classical Greek
|
||
|
civilization, which was released in February 1992 in version 1.0 and
|
||
|
distributed by Yale University Press.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Consisting entirely of primary materials, Perseus includes ancient Greek
|
||
|
texts and translations of those texts; catalog entries--that is, museum
|
||
|
catalog entries, not library catalog entries--on vases, sites, coins,
|
||
|
sculpture, and archaeological objects; maps; and a dictionary, among
|
||
|
other sources. The number of objects and the objects for which catalog
|
||
|
entries exist are accompanied by thousands of color images, which
|
||
|
constitute a major feature of the database. Perseus contains
|
||
|
approximately 30 megabytes of text, an amount that will double in
|
||
|
subsequent versions. In addition to these primary materials, the Perseus
|
||
|
Project has been building tools for using them, making access and
|
||
|
navigation easier, the goal being to build part of the electronic
|
||
|
environment discussed earlier in the morning in which students or
|
||
|
scholars can work with their sources.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The demonstration of Perseus will show only a fraction of the real work
|
||
|
that has gone into it, because the project had to face the dilemma of
|
||
|
what to enter when putting something into machine-readable form: should
|
||
|
one aim for very high quality or make concessions in order to get the
|
||
|
material in? Since Perseus decided to opt for very high quality, all of
|
||
|
its primary materials exist in a system-independent--insofar as it is
|
||
|
possible to be system-independent--archival form. Deciding what that
|
||
|
archival form would be and attaining it required much work and thought.
|
||
|
For example, all the texts are marked up in SGML, which will be made
|
||
|
compatible with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) when
|
||
|
they are issued.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Drawings are postscript files, not meeting international standards, but
|
||
|
at least designed to go across platforms. Images, or rather the real
|
||
|
archival forms, consist of the best available slides, which are being
|
||
|
digitized. Much of the catalog material exists in database form--a form
|
||
|
that the average user could use, manipulate, and display on a personal
|
||
|
computer, but only at great cost. Thus, this is where the concession
|
||
|
comes in: All of this rich, well-marked-up information is stripped of
|
||
|
much of its content; the images are converted into bit-maps and the text
|
||
|
into small formatted chunks. All this information can then be imported
|
||
|
into HyperCard and run on a mid-range Macintosh, which is what Perseus
|
||
|
users have. This fact has made it possible for Perseus to attain wide
|
||
|
use fairly rapidly. Without those archival forms the HyperCard version
|
||
|
being demonstrated could not be made easily, and the project could not
|
||
|
have the potential to move to other forms and machines and software as
|
||
|
they appear, none of which information is in Perseus on the CD.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Of the numerous multimedia aspects of Perseus, MYLONAS focused on the
|
||
|
textual. Part of what makes Perseus such a pleasure to use, MYLONAS
|
||
|
said, is this effort at seamless integration and the ability to move
|
||
|
around both visual and textual material. Perseus also made the decision
|
||
|
not to attempt to interpret its material any more than one interprets by
|
||
|
selecting. But, MYLONAS emphasized, Perseus is not courseware: No
|
||
|
syllabus exists. There is no effort to define how one teaches a topic
|
||
|
using Perseus, although the project may eventually collect papers by
|
||
|
people who have used it to teach. Rather, Perseus aims to provide
|
||
|
primary material in a kind of electronic library, an electronic sandbox,
|
||
|
so to say, in which students and scholars who are working on this
|
||
|
material can explore by themselves. With that, MYLONAS demonstrated
|
||
|
Perseus, beginning with the Perseus gateway, the first thing one sees
|
||
|
upon opening Perseus--an effort in part to solve the contextualizing
|
||
|
problem--which tells the user what the system contains.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MYLONAS demonstrated only a very small portion, beginning with primary
|
||
|
texts and running off the CD-ROM. Having selected Aeschylus' Prometheus
|
||
|
Bound, which was viewable in Greek and English pretty much in the same
|
||
|
segments together, MYLONAS demonstrated tools to use with the Greek text,
|
||
|
something not possible with a book: looking up the dictionary entry form
|
||
|
of an unfamiliar word in Greek after subjecting it to Perseus'
|
||
|
morphological analysis for all the texts. After finding out about a
|
||
|
word, a user may then decide to see if it is used anywhere else in Greek.
|
||
|
Because vast amounts of indexing support all of the primary material, one
|
||
|
can find out where else all forms of a particular Greek word appear--
|
||
|
often not a trivial matter because Greek is highly inflected. Further,
|
||
|
since the story of Prometheus has to do with the origins of sacrifice, a
|
||
|
user may wish to study and explore sacrifice in Greek literature; by
|
||
|
typing sacrifice into a small window, a user goes to the English-Greek
|
||
|
word list--something one cannot do without the computer (Perseus has
|
||
|
indexed the definitions of its dictionary)--the string sacrifice appears
|
||
|
in the definitions of these sixty-five words. One may then find out
|
||
|
where any of those words is used in the work(s) of a particular author.
|
||
|
The English definitions are not lemmatized.
|
||
|
|
||
|
All of the indices driving this kind of usage were originally devised for
|
||
|
speed, MYLONAS observed; in other words, all that kind of information--
|
||
|
all forms of all words, where they exist, the dictionary form they belong
|
||
|
to--were collected into databases, which will expedite searching. Then
|
||
|
it was discovered that one can do things searching in these databases
|
||
|
that could not be done searching in the full texts. Thus, although there
|
||
|
are full-text searches in Perseus, much of the work is done behind the
|
||
|
scenes, using prepared indices. Re the indexing that is done behind the
|
||
|
scenes, MYLONAS pointed out that without the SGML forms of the text, it
|
||
|
could not be done effectively. Much of this indexing is based on the
|
||
|
structures that are made explicit by the SGML tagging.
|
||
|
|
||
|
It was found that one of the things many of Perseus' non-Greek-reading
|
||
|
users do is start from the dictionary and then move into the close study
|
||
|
of words and concepts via this kind of English-Greek word search, by which
|
||
|
means they might select a concept. This exercise has been assigned to
|
||
|
students in core courses at Harvard--to study a concept by looking for the
|
||
|
English word in the dictionary, finding the Greek words, and then finding
|
||
|
the words in the Greek but, of course, reading across in the English.
|
||
|
That tells them a great deal about what a translation means as well.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Should one also wish to see images that have to do with sacrifice, that
|
||
|
person would go to the object key word search, which allows one to
|
||
|
perform a similar kind of index retrieval on the database of
|
||
|
archaeological objects. Without words, pictures are useless; Perseus has
|
||
|
not reached the point where it can do much with images that are not
|
||
|
cataloged. Thus, although it is possible in Perseus with text and images
|
||
|
to navigate by knowing where one wants to end up--for example, a
|
||
|
red-figure vase from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts--one can perform this
|
||
|
kind of navigation very easily by tracing down indices. MYLONAS
|
||
|
illustrated several generic scenes of sacrifice on vases. The features
|
||
|
demonstrated derived from Perseus 1.0; version 2.0 will implement even
|
||
|
better means of retrieval.
|
||
|
|
||
|
MYLONAS closed by looking at one of the pictures and noting again that
|
||
|
one can do a great deal of research using the iconography as well as the
|
||
|
texts. For instance, students in a core course at Harvard this year were
|
||
|
highly interested in Greek concepts of foreigners and representations of
|
||
|
non-Greeks. So they performed a great deal of research, both with texts
|
||
|
(e.g., Herodotus) and with iconography on vases and coins, on how the
|
||
|
Greeks portrayed non-Greeks. At the same time, art historians who study
|
||
|
iconography were also interested, and were able to use this material.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Indexing and searchability of all English words in Perseus *
|
||
|
Several features of Perseus 1.0 * Several levels of customization
|
||
|
possible * Perseus used for general education * Perseus' effects on
|
||
|
education * Contextual information in Perseus * Main challenge and
|
||
|
emphasis of Perseus *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Several points emerged in the discussion that followed MYLONAS's presentation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Although MYLONAS had not demonstrated Perseus' ability to cross-search
|
||
|
documents, she confirmed that all English words in Perseus are indexed
|
||
|
and can be searched. So, for example, sacrifice could have been searched
|
||
|
in all texts, the historical essay, and all the catalogue entries with
|
||
|
their descriptions--in short, in all of Perseus.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Boolean logic is not in Perseus 1.0 but will be added to the next
|
||
|
version, although an effort is being made not to restrict Perseus to a
|
||
|
database in which one just performs searching, Boolean or otherwise. It
|
||
|
is possible to move laterally through the documents by selecting a word
|
||
|
one is interested in and selecting an area of information one is
|
||
|
interested in and trying to look that word up in that area.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Since Perseus was developed in HyperCard, several levels of customization
|
||
|
are possible. Simple authoring tools exist that allow one to create
|
||
|
annotated paths through the information, which are useful for note-taking
|
||
|
and for guided tours for teaching purposes and for expository writing.
|
||
|
With a little more ingenuity it is possible to begin to add or substitute
|
||
|
material in Perseus.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Perseus has not been used so much for classics education as for general
|
||
|
education, where it seemed to have an impact on the students in the core
|
||
|
course at Harvard (a general required course that students must take in
|
||
|
certain areas). Students were able to use primary material much more.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Perseus Project has an evaluation team at the University of Maryland
|
||
|
that has been documenting Perseus' effects on education. Perseus is very
|
||
|
popular, and anecdotal evidence indicates that it is having an effect at
|
||
|
places other than Harvard, for example, test sites at Ball State
|
||
|
University, Drury College, and numerous small places where opportunities
|
||
|
to use vast amounts of primary data may not exist. One documented effect
|
||
|
is that archaeological, anthropological, and philological research is
|
||
|
being done by the same person instead of by three different people.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The contextual information in Perseus includes an overview essay, a
|
||
|
fairly linear historical essay on the fifth century B.C. that provides
|
||
|
links into the primary material (e.g., Herodotus, Thucydides, and
|
||
|
Plutarch), via small gray underscoring (on the screen) of linked
|
||
|
passages. These are handmade links into other material.
|
||
|
|
||
|
To different extents, most of the production work was done at Harvard,
|
||
|
where the people and the equipment are located. Much of the
|
||
|
collaborative activity involved data collection and structuring, because
|
||
|
the main challenge and the emphasis of Perseus is the gathering of
|
||
|
primary material, that is, building a useful environment for studying
|
||
|
classical Greece, collecting data, and making it useful.
|
||
|
Systems-building is definitely not the main concern. Thus, much of the
|
||
|
work has involved writing essays, collecting information, rewriting it,
|
||
|
and tagging it. That can be done off site. The creative link for the
|
||
|
overview essay as well as for both systems and data was collaborative,
|
||
|
and was forged via E-mail and paper mail with professors at Pomona and
|
||
|
Bowdoin.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
CALALUCA * PLD's principal focus and contribution to scholarship *
|
||
|
Various questions preparatory to beginning the project * Basis for
|
||
|
project * Basic rule in converting PLD * Concerning the images in PLD *
|
||
|
Running PLD under a variety of retrieval softwares * Encoding the
|
||
|
database a hard-fought issue * Various features demonstrated * Importance
|
||
|
of user documentation * Limitations of the CD-ROM version *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Eric CALALUCA, vice president, Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., demonstrated a
|
||
|
software interpretation of the Patrologia Latina Database (PLD). PLD's
|
||
|
principal focus from the beginning of the project about three-and-a-half
|
||
|
years ago was on converting Migne's Latin series, and in the end,
|
||
|
CALALUCA suggested, conversion of the text will be the major contribution
|
||
|
to scholarship. CALALUCA stressed that, as possibly the only private
|
||
|
publishing organization at the Workshop, Chadwyck-Healey had sought no
|
||
|
federal funds or national foundation support before embarking upon the
|
||
|
project, but instead had relied upon a great deal of homework and
|
||
|
marketing to accomplish the task of conversion.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ever since the possibilities of computer-searching have emerged, scholars
|
||
|
in the field of late ancient and early medieval studies (philosophers,
|
||
|
theologians, classicists, and those studying the history of natural law
|
||
|
and the history of the legal development of Western civilization) have
|
||
|
been longing for a fully searchable version of Western literature, for
|
||
|
example, all the texts of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux and
|
||
|
Boethius, not to mention all the secondary and tertiary authors.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Various questions arose, CALALUCA said. Should one convert Migne?
|
||
|
Should the database be encoded? Is it necessary to do that? How should
|
||
|
it be delivered? What about CD-ROM? Since this is a transitional
|
||
|
medium, why even bother to create software to run on a CD-ROM? Since
|
||
|
everybody knows people will be networking information, why go to the
|
||
|
trouble--which is far greater with CD-ROM than with the production of
|
||
|
magnetic data? Finally, how does one make the data available? Can many
|
||
|
of the hurdles to using electronic information that some publishers have
|
||
|
imposed upon databases be eliminated?
|
||
|
|
||
|
The PLD project was based on the principle that computer-searching of
|
||
|
texts is most effective when it is done with a large database. Because
|
||
|
PLD represented a collection that serves so many disciplines across so
|
||
|
many periods, it was irresistible.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The basic rule in converting PLD was to do no harm, to avoid the sins of
|
||
|
intrusion in such a database: no introduction of newer editions, no
|
||
|
on-the-spot changes, no eradicating of all possible falsehoods from an
|
||
|
edition. Thus, PLD is not the final act in electronic publishing for
|
||
|
this discipline, but simply the beginning. The conversion of PLD has
|
||
|
evoked numerous unanticipated questions: How will information be used?
|
||
|
What about networking? Can the rights of a database be protected?
|
||
|
Should one protect the rights of a database? How can it be made
|
||
|
available?
|
||
|
|
||
|
Those converting PLD also tried to avoid the sins of omission, that is,
|
||
|
excluding portions of the collections or whole sections. What about the
|
||
|
images? PLD is full of images, some are extremely pious
|
||
|
nineteenth-century representations of the Fathers, while others contain
|
||
|
highly interesting elements. The goal was to cover all the text of Migne
|
||
|
(including notes, in Greek and in Hebrew, the latter of which, in
|
||
|
particular, causes problems in creating a search structure), all the
|
||
|
indices, and even the images, which are being scanned in separately
|
||
|
searchable files.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Several North American institutions that have placed acquisition requests
|
||
|
for the PLD database have requested it in magnetic form without software,
|
||
|
which means they are already running it without software, without
|
||
|
anything demonstrated at the Workshop.
|
||
|
|
||
|
What cannot practically be done is go back and reconvert and re-encode
|
||
|
data, a time-consuming and extremely costly enterprise. CALALUCA sees
|
||
|
PLD as a database that can, and should, be run under a variety of
|
||
|
retrieval softwares. This will permit the widest possible searches.
|
||
|
Consequently, the need to produce a CD-ROM of PLD, as well as to develop
|
||
|
software that could handle some 1.3 gigabyte of heavily encoded text,
|
||
|
developed out of conversations with collection development and reference
|
||
|
librarians who wanted software both compassionate enough for the
|
||
|
pedestrian but also capable of incorporating the most detailed
|
||
|
lexicographical studies that a user desires to conduct. In the end, the
|
||
|
encoding and conversion of the data will prove the most enduring
|
||
|
testament to the value of the project.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The encoding of the database was also a hard-fought issue: Did the
|
||
|
database need to be encoded? Were there normative structures for encoding
|
||
|
humanist texts? Should it be SGML? What about the TEI--will it last,
|
||
|
will it prove useful? CALALUCA expressed some minor doubts as to whether
|
||
|
a data bank can be fully TEI-conformant. Every effort can be made, but
|
||
|
in the end to be TEI-conformant means to accept the need to make some
|
||
|
firm encoding decisions that can, indeed, be disputed. The TEI points
|
||
|
the publisher in a proper direction but does not presume to make all the
|
||
|
decisions for him or her. Essentially, the goal of encoding was to
|
||
|
eliminate, as much as possible, the hindrances to information-networking,
|
||
|
so that if an institution acquires a database, everybody associated with
|
||
|
the institution can have access to it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
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.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
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 *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
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 period, all of
|
||
|
New York City. Taken together, AM believes, they provide an interesting
|
||
|
documentary resource.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Using the frame-grabber in AM * Volume of material processed
|
||
|
and to be processed * Purpose of AM within LC * Cataloguing and the
|
||
|
nature of AM's material * SGML coding and the question of quality versus
|
||
|
quantity *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the question-and-answer period that followed FLEISCHHAUER's
|
||
|
presentation, several clarifications were made.
|
||
|
|
||
|
AM is bringing in motion pictures from a videodisc. The frame-grabber
|
||
|
devices create a window on a computer screen, which permits users to
|
||
|
digitize a single frame of the movie or one of the photographs. It
|
||
|
produces a crude, rough-and-ready image that high school students can
|
||
|
incorporate into papers, and that has worked very nicely in this way.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Commenting on FLEISCHHAUER's assertion that AM was looking more at
|
||
|
searching ideas than words, MYLONAS argued that without words an idea
|
||
|
does not exist. FLEISCHHAUER conceded that he ought to have articulated
|
||
|
his point more clearly. MYLONAS stated that they were in fact both
|
||
|
talking about the same thing. By searching for words and by forcing
|
||
|
people to focus on the word, the Perseus Project felt that they would get
|
||
|
them to the idea. The way one reviews results is tailored more to one
|
||
|
kind of user than another.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning the total volume of material that has been processed in this
|
||
|
way, AM at this point has in retrievable form seven or eight collections,
|
||
|
all of them photographic. In the Macintosh environment, for example,
|
||
|
there probably are 35,000-40,000 photographs. The sound recordings
|
||
|
number sixty items. The broadsides number about 300 items. There are
|
||
|
500 political cartoons in the form of drawings. The motion pictures, as
|
||
|
individual items, number sixty to seventy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
AM also has a manuscript collection, the life history portion of one of
|
||
|
the federal project series, which will contain 2,900 individual
|
||
|
documents, all first-person narratives. AM has in process about 350
|
||
|
African-American pamphlets, or about 12,000 printed pages for the period
|
||
|
1870-1910. Also in the works are some 4,000 panoramic photographs. AM
|
||
|
has recycled a fair amount of the work done by LC's Prints and
|
||
|
Photographs Division during the Library's optical disk pilot project in
|
||
|
the 1980s. For example, a special division of LC has tooled up and
|
||
|
thought through all the ramifications of electronic presentation of
|
||
|
photographs. Indeed, they are wheeling them out in great barrel loads.
|
||
|
The purpose of AM within the Library, it is hoped, is to catalyze several
|
||
|
of the other special collection divisions which have no particular
|
||
|
experience with, in some cases, mixed feelings about, an activity such as
|
||
|
AM. Moreover, in many cases the divisions may be characterized as not
|
||
|
only lacking experience in "electronifying" things but also in automated
|
||
|
cataloguing. MARC cataloguing as practiced in the United States is
|
||
|
heavily weighted toward the description of monograph and serial
|
||
|
materials, but is much thinner when one enters the world of manuscripts
|
||
|
and things that are held in the Library's music collection and other
|
||
|
units. In response to a comment by LESK, that AM's material is very
|
||
|
heavily photographic, and is so primarily because individual records have
|
||
|
been made for each photograph, FLEISCHHAUER observed that an item-level
|
||
|
catalog record exists, for example, for each photograph in the Detroit
|
||
|
Publishing collection of 25,000 pictures. In the case of the Federal
|
||
|
Writers Project, for which nearly 3,000 documents exist, representing
|
||
|
information from twenty-six different states, AM with the assistance of
|
||
|
Karen STUART of the Manuscript Division will attempt to find some way not
|
||
|
only to have a collection-level record but perhaps a MARC record for each
|
||
|
state, which will then serve as an umbrella for the 100-200 documents
|
||
|
that come under it. But that drama remains to be enacted. The AM staff
|
||
|
is conservative and clings to cataloguing, though of course visitors tout
|
||
|
artificial intelligence and neural networks in a manner that suggests that
|
||
|
perhaps one need not have cataloguing or that much of it could be put aside.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The matter of SGML coding, FLEISCHHAUER conceded, returned the discussion
|
||
|
to the earlier treated question of quality versus quantity in the Library
|
||
|
of Congress. Of course, text conversion can be done with 100-percent
|
||
|
accuracy, but it means that when one's holdings are as vast as LC's only
|
||
|
a tiny amount will be exposed, whereas permitting lower levels of
|
||
|
accuracy can lead to exposing or sharing larger amounts, but with the
|
||
|
quality correspondingly impaired.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
TWOHIG * A contrary experience concerning electronic options * Volume of
|
||
|
material in the Washington papers and a suggestion of David Packard *
|
||
|
Implications of Packard's suggestion * Transcribing the documents for the
|
||
|
CD-ROM * Accuracy of transcriptions * The CD-ROM edition of the Founding
|
||
|
Fathers documents *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finding encouragement in a comment of MICHELSON's from the morning
|
||
|
session--that numerous people in the humanities were choosing electronic
|
||
|
options to do their work--Dorothy TWOHIG, editor, The Papers of George
|
||
|
Washington, opened her illustrated talk by noting that her experience
|
||
|
with literary scholars and numerous people in editing was contrary to
|
||
|
MICHELSON's. TWOHIG emphasized literary scholars' complete ignorance of
|
||
|
the technological options available to them or their reluctance or, in
|
||
|
some cases, their downright hostility toward these options.
|
||
|
|
||
|
After providing an overview of the five Founding Fathers projects
|
||
|
(Jefferson at Princeton, Franklin at Yale, John Adams at the
|
||
|
Massachusetts Historical Society, and Madison down the hall from her at
|
||
|
the University of Virginia), TWOHIG observed that the Washington papers,
|
||
|
like all of the projects, include both sides of the Washington
|
||
|
correspondence and deal with some 135,000 documents to be published with
|
||
|
extensive annotation in eighty to eighty-five volumes, a project that
|
||
|
will not be completed until well into the next century. Thus, it was
|
||
|
with considerable enthusiasm several years ago that the Washington Papers
|
||
|
Project (WPP) greeted David Packard's suggestion that the papers of the
|
||
|
Founding Fathers could be published easily and inexpensively, and to the
|
||
|
great benefit of American scholarship, via CD-ROM.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In pragmatic terms, funding from the Packard Foundation would expedite
|
||
|
the transcription of thousands of documents waiting to be put on disk in
|
||
|
the WPP offices. Further, since the costs of collecting, editing, and
|
||
|
converting the Founding Fathers documents into letterpress editions were
|
||
|
running into the millions of dollars, and the considerable staffs
|
||
|
involved in all of these projects were devoting their careers to
|
||
|
producing the work, the Packard Foundation's suggestion had a
|
||
|
revolutionary aspect: Transcriptions of the entire corpus of the
|
||
|
Founding Fathers papers would be available on CD-ROM to public and
|
||
|
college libraries, even high schools, at a fraction of the cost--
|
||
|
$100-$150 for the annual license fee--to produce a limited university
|
||
|
press run of 1,000 of each volume of the published papers at $45-$150 per
|
||
|
printed volume. Given the current budget crunch in educational systems
|
||
|
and the corresponding constraints on librarians in smaller institutions
|
||
|
who wish to add these volumes to their collections, producing the
|
||
|
documents on CD-ROM would likely open a greatly expanded audience for the
|
||
|
papers. TWOHIG stressed, however, that development of the Founding
|
||
|
Fathers CD-ROM is still in its infancy. Serious software problems remain
|
||
|
to be resolved before the material can be put into readable form.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Funding from the Packard Foundation resulted in a major push to
|
||
|
transcribe the 75,000 or so documents of the Washington papers remaining
|
||
|
to be transcribed onto computer disks. Slides illustrated several of the
|
||
|
problems encountered, for example, the present inability of CD-ROM to
|
||
|
indicate the cross-outs (deleted material) in eighteenth century
|
||
|
documents. TWOHIG next described documents from various periods in the
|
||
|
eighteenth century that have been transcribed in chronological order and
|
||
|
delivered to the Packard offices in California, where they are converted
|
||
|
to the CD-ROM, a process that is expected to consume five years to
|
||
|
complete (that is, reckoning from David Packard's suggestion made several
|
||
|
years ago, until about July 1994). TWOHIG found an encouraging
|
||
|
indication of the project's benefits in the ongoing use made by scholars
|
||
|
of the search functions of the CD-ROM, particularly in reducing the time
|
||
|
spent in manually turning the pages of the Washington papers.
|
||
|
|
||
|
TWOHIG next furnished details concerning the accuracy of transcriptions.
|
||
|
For instance, the insertion of thousands of documents on the CD-ROM
|
||
|
currently does not permit each document to be verified against the
|
||
|
original manuscript several times as in the case of documents that appear
|
||
|
in the published edition. However, the transcriptions receive a cursory
|
||
|
check for obvious typos, the misspellings of proper names, and other
|
||
|
errors from the WPP CD-ROM editor. Eventually, all documents that appear
|
||
|
in the electronic version will be checked by project editors. Although
|
||
|
this process has met with opposition from some of the editors on the
|
||
|
grounds that imperfect work may leave their offices, the advantages in
|
||
|
making this material available as a research tool outweigh fears about the
|
||
|
misspelling of proper names and other relatively minor editorial matters.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Completion of all five Founding Fathers projects (i.e., retrievability
|
||
|
and searchability of all of the documents by proper names, alternate
|
||
|
spellings, or varieties of subjects) will provide one of the richest
|
||
|
sources of this size for the history of the United States in the latter
|
||
|
part of the eighteenth century. Further, publication on CD-ROM will
|
||
|
allow editors to include even minutiae, such as laundry lists, not
|
||
|
included in the printed volumes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
It seems possible that the extensive annotation provided in the printed
|
||
|
volumes eventually will be added to the CD-ROM edition, pending
|
||
|
negotiations with the publishers of the papers. At the moment, the
|
||
|
Founding Fathers CD-ROM is accessible only on the IBYCUS, a computer
|
||
|
developed out of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project and designed for
|
||
|
the use of classical scholars. There are perhaps 400 IBYCUS computers in
|
||
|
the country, most of which are in university classics departments.
|
||
|
Ultimately, it is anticipated that the CD-ROM edition of the Founding
|
||
|
Fathers documents will run on any IBM-compatible or Macintosh computer
|
||
|
with a CD-ROM drive. Numerous changes in the software will also occur
|
||
|
before the project is completed. (Editor's note: an IBYCUS was
|
||
|
unavailable to demonstrate the CD-ROM.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Several additional features of WPP clarified *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Discussion following TWOHIG's presentation served to clarify several
|
||
|
additional features, including (1) that the project's primary
|
||
|
intellectual product consists in the electronic transcription of the
|
||
|
material; (2) that the text transmitted to the CD-ROM people is not
|
||
|
marked up; (3) that cataloging and subject-indexing of the material
|
||
|
remain to be worked out (though at this point material can be retrieved
|
||
|
by name); and (4) that because all the searching is done in the hardware,
|
||
|
the IBYCUS is designed to read a CD-ROM which contains only sequential
|
||
|
text files. Technically, it then becomes very easy to read the material
|
||
|
off and put it on another device.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
LEBRON * Overview of the history of the joint project between AAAS and
|
||
|
OCLC * Several practices the on-line environment shares with traditional
|
||
|
publishing on hard copy * Several technical and behavioral barriers to
|
||
|
electronic publishing * How AAAS and OCLC arrived at the subject of
|
||
|
clinical trials * Advantages of the electronic format and other features
|
||
|
of OJCCT * An illustrated tour of the journal *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Maria LEBRON, managing editor, The Online Journal of Current Clinical
|
||
|
Trials (OJCCT), presented an illustrated overview of the history of the
|
||
|
joint project between the American Association for the Advancement of
|
||
|
Science (AAAS) and the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC). The
|
||
|
joint venture between AAAS and OCLC owes its beginning to a
|
||
|
reorganization launched by the new chief executive officer at OCLC about
|
||
|
three years ago and combines the strengths of these two disparate
|
||
|
organizations. In short, OJCCT represents the process of scholarly
|
||
|
publishing on line.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LEBRON next discussed several practices the on-line environment shares
|
||
|
with traditional publishing on hard copy--for example, peer review of
|
||
|
manuscripts--that are highly important in the academic world. LEBRON
|
||
|
noted in particular the implications of citation counts for tenure
|
||
|
committees and grants committees. In the traditional hard-copy
|
||
|
environment, citation counts are readily demonstrable, whereas the
|
||
|
on-line environment represents an ethereal medium to most academics.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LEBRON remarked several technical and behavioral barriers to electronic
|
||
|
publishing, for instance, the problems in transmission created by special
|
||
|
characters or by complex graphics and halftones. In addition, she noted
|
||
|
economic limitations such as the storage costs of maintaining back issues
|
||
|
and market or audience education.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Manuscripts cannot be uploaded to OJCCT, LEBRON explained, because it is
|
||
|
not a bulletin board or E-mail, forms of electronic transmission of
|
||
|
information that have created an ambience clouding people's understanding
|
||
|
of what the journal is attempting to do. OJCCT, which publishes
|
||
|
peer-reviewed medical articles dealing with the subject of clinical
|
||
|
trials, includes text, tabular material, and graphics, although at this
|
||
|
time it can transmit only line illustrations.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Next, LEBRON described how AAAS and OCLC arrived at the subject of
|
||
|
clinical trials: It is 1) a highly statistical discipline that 2) does
|
||
|
not require halftones but can satisfy the needs of its audience with line
|
||
|
illustrations and graphic material, and 3) there is a need for the speedy
|
||
|
dissemination of high-quality research results. Clinical trials are
|
||
|
research activities that involve the administration of a test treatment
|
||
|
to some experimental unit in order to test its usefulness before it is
|
||
|
made available to the general population. LEBRON proceeded to give
|
||
|
additional information on OJCCT concerning its editor-in-chief, editorial
|
||
|
board, editorial content, and the types of articles it publishes
|
||
|
(including peer-reviewed research reports and reviews), as well as
|
||
|
features shared by other traditional hard-copy journals.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Among the advantages of the electronic format are faster dissemination of
|
||
|
information, including raw data, and the absence of space constraints
|
||
|
because pages do not exist. (This latter fact creates an interesting
|
||
|
situation when it comes to citations.) Nor are there any issues. AAAS's
|
||
|
capacity to download materials directly from the journal to a
|
||
|
subscriber's printer, hard drive, or floppy disk helps ensure highly
|
||
|
accurate transcription. Other features of OJCCT include on-screen alerts
|
||
|
that allow linkage of subsequently published documents to the original
|
||
|
documents; on-line searching by subject, author, title, etc.; indexing of
|
||
|
every single word that appears in an article; viewing access to an
|
||
|
article by component (abstract, full text, or graphs); numbered
|
||
|
paragraphs to replace page counts; publication in Science every thirty
|
||
|
days of indexing of all articles published in the journal;
|
||
|
typeset-quality screens; and Hypertext links that enable subscribers to
|
||
|
bring up Medline abstracts directly without leaving the journal.
|
||
|
|
||
|
After detailing the two primary ways to gain access to the journal,
|
||
|
through the OCLC network and Compuserv if one desires graphics or through
|
||
|
the Internet if just an ASCII file is desired, LEBRON illustrated the
|
||
|
speedy editorial process and the coding of the document using SGML tags
|
||
|
after it has been accepted for publication. She also gave an illustrated
|
||
|
tour of the journal, its search-and-retrieval capabilities in particular,
|
||
|
but also including problems associated with scanning in illustrations,
|
||
|
and the importance of on-screen alerts to the medical profession re
|
||
|
retractions or corrections, or more frequently, editorials, letters to
|
||
|
the editors, or follow-up reports. She closed by inviting the audience
|
||
|
to join AAAS on 1 July, when OJCCT was scheduled to go on-line.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Additional features of OJCCT *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the lengthy discussion that followed LEBRON's presentation, these
|
||
|
points emerged:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The SGML text can be tailored as users wish.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* All these articles have a fairly simple document definition.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Document-type definitions (DTDs) were developed and given to OJCCT
|
||
|
for coding.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* No articles will be removed from the journal. (Because there are
|
||
|
no back issues, there are no lost issues either. Once a subscriber
|
||
|
logs onto the journal he or she has access not only to the currently
|
||
|
published materials, but retrospectively to everything that has been
|
||
|
published in it. Thus the table of contents grows bigger. The date
|
||
|
of publication serves to distinguish between currently published
|
||
|
materials and older materials.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The pricing system for the journal resembles that for most medical
|
||
|
journals: for 1992, $95 for a year, plus telecommunications charges
|
||
|
(there are no connect time charges); for 1993, $110 for the
|
||
|
entire year for single users, though the journal can be put on a
|
||
|
local area network (LAN). However, only one person can access the
|
||
|
journal at a time. Site licenses may come in the future.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* AAAS is working closely with colleagues at OCLC to display
|
||
|
mathematical equations on screen.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Without compromising any steps in the editorial process, the
|
||
|
technology has reduced the time lag between when a manuscript is
|
||
|
originally submitted and the time it is accepted; the review process
|
||
|
does not differ greatly from the standard six-to-eight weeks
|
||
|
employed by many of the hard-copy journals. The process still
|
||
|
depends on people.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* As far as a preservation copy is concerned, articles will be
|
||
|
maintained on the computer permanently and subscribers, as part of
|
||
|
their subscription, will receive a microfiche-quality archival copy
|
||
|
of everything published during that year; in addition, reprints can
|
||
|
be purchased in much the same way as in a hard-copy environment.
|
||
|
Hard copies are prepared but are not the primary medium for the
|
||
|
dissemination of the information.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Because OJCCT is not yet on line, it is difficult to know how many
|
||
|
people would simply browse through the journal on the screen as
|
||
|
opposed to downloading the whole thing and printing it out; a mix of
|
||
|
both types of users likely will result.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
PERSONIUS * Developments in technology over the past decade * The CLASS
|
||
|
Project * Advantages for technology and for the CLASS Project *
|
||
|
Developing a network application an underlying assumption of the project
|
||
|
* Details of the scanning process * Print-on-demand copies of books *
|
||
|
Future plans include development of a browsing tool *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Lynne PERSONIUS, assistant director, Cornell Information Technologies for
|
||
|
Scholarly Information Services, Cornell University, first commented on
|
||
|
the tremendous impact that developments in technology over the past ten
|
||
|
years--networking, in particular--have had on the way information is
|
||
|
handled, and how, in her own case, these developments have counterbalanced
|
||
|
Cornell's relative geographical isolation. Other significant technologies
|
||
|
include scanners, which are much more sophisticated than they were ten years
|
||
|
ago; mass storage and the dramatic savings that result from it in terms of
|
||
|
both space and money relative to twenty or thirty years ago; new and
|
||
|
improved printing technologies, which have greatly affected the distribution
|
||
|
of information; and, of course, digital technologies, whose applicability to
|
||
|
library preservation remains at issue.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Given that context, PERSONIUS described the College Library Access and
|
||
|
Storage System (CLASS) Project, a library preservation project,
|
||
|
primarily, and what has been accomplished. Directly funded by the
|
||
|
Commission on Preservation and Access and by the Xerox Corporation, which
|
||
|
has provided a significant amount of hardware, the CLASS Project has been
|
||
|
working with a development team at Xerox to develop a software
|
||
|
application tailored to library preservation requirements. Within
|
||
|
Cornell, participants in the project have been working jointly with both
|
||
|
library and information technologies. The focus of the project has been
|
||
|
on reformatting and saving books that are in brittle condition.
|
||
|
PERSONIUS showed Workshop participants a brittle book, and described how
|
||
|
such books were the result of developments in papermaking around the
|
||
|
beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The papermaking process was
|
||
|
changed so that a significant amount of acid was introduced into the
|
||
|
actual paper itself, which deteriorates as it sits on library shelves.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One of the advantages for technology and for the CLASS Project is that
|
||
|
the information in brittle books is mostly out of copyright and thus
|
||
|
offers an opportunity to work with material that requires library
|
||
|
preservation, and to create and work on an infrastructure to save the
|
||
|
material. Acknowledging the familiarity of those working in preservation
|
||
|
with this information, PERSONIUS noted that several things are being
|
||
|
done: the primary preservation technology used today is photocopying of
|
||
|
brittle material. Saving the intellectual content of the material is the
|
||
|
main goal. With microfilm copy, the intellectual content is preserved on
|
||
|
the assumption that in the future the image can be reformatted in any
|
||
|
other way that then exists.
|
||
|
|
||
|
An underlying assumption of the CLASS Project from the beginning was
|
||
|
that it would develop a network application. Project staff scan books
|
||
|
at a workstation located in the library, near the brittle material.
|
||
|
An image-server filing system is located at a distance from that
|
||
|
workstation, and a printer is located in another building. All of the
|
||
|
materials digitized and stored on the image-filing system are cataloged
|
||
|
in the on-line catalogue. In fact, a record for each of these electronic
|
||
|
books is stored in the RLIN database so that a record exists of what is
|
||
|
in the digital library throughout standard catalogue procedures. In the
|
||
|
future, researchers working from their own workstations in their offices,
|
||
|
or their networks, will have access--wherever they might be--through a
|
||
|
request server being built into the new digital library. A second
|
||
|
assumption is that the preferred means of finding the material will be by
|
||
|
looking through a catalogue. PERSONIUS described the scanning process,
|
||
|
which uses a prototype scanner being developed by Xerox and which scans a
|
||
|
very high resolution image at great speed. Another significant feature,
|
||
|
because this is a preservation application, is the placing of the pages
|
||
|
that fall apart one for one on the platen. Ordinarily, a scanner could
|
||
|
be used with some sort of a document feeder, but because of this
|
||
|
application that is not feasible. Further, because CLASS is a
|
||
|
preservation application, after the paper replacement is made there, a
|
||
|
very careful quality control check is performed. An original book is
|
||
|
compared to the printed copy and verification is made, before proceeding,
|
||
|
that all of the image, all of the information, has been captured. Then,
|
||
|
a new library book is produced: The printed images are rebound by a
|
||
|
commercial binder and a new book is returned to the shelf.
|
||
|
Significantly, the books returned to the library shelves are beautiful
|
||
|
and useful replacements on acid-free paper that should last a long time,
|
||
|
in effect, the equivalent of preservation photocopies. Thus, the project
|
||
|
has a library of digital books. In essence, CLASS is scanning and
|
||
|
storing books as 600 dot-per-inch bit-mapped images, compressed using
|
||
|
Group 4 CCITT (i.e., the French acronym for International Consultative
|
||
|
Committee for Telegraph and Telephone) compression. They are stored as
|
||
|
TIFF files on an optical filing system that is composed of a database
|
||
|
used for searching and locating the books and an optical jukebox that
|
||
|
stores 64 twelve-inch platters. A very-high-resolution printed copy of
|
||
|
these books at 600 dots per inch is created, using a Xerox DocuTech
|
||
|
printer to make the paper replacements on acid-free paper.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PERSONIUS maintained that the CLASS Project presents an opportunity to
|
||
|
introduce people to books as digital images by using a paper medium.
|
||
|
Books are returned to the shelves while people are also given the ability
|
||
|
to print on demand--to make their own copies of books. (PERSONIUS
|
||
|
distributed copies of an engineering journal published by engineering
|
||
|
students at Cornell around 1900 as an example of what a print-on-demand
|
||
|
copy of material might be like. This very cheap copy would be available
|
||
|
to people to use for their own research purposes and would bridge the gap
|
||
|
between an electronic work and the paper that readers like to have.)
|
||
|
PERSONIUS then attempted to illustrate a very early prototype of
|
||
|
networked access to this digital library. Xerox Corporation has
|
||
|
developed a prototype of a view station that can send images across the
|
||
|
network to be viewed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The particular library brought down for demonstration contained two
|
||
|
mathematics books. CLASS is developing and will spend the next year
|
||
|
developing an application that allows people at workstations to browse
|
||
|
the books. Thus, CLASS is developing a browsing tool, on the assumption
|
||
|
that users do not want to read an entire book from a workstation, but
|
||
|
would prefer to be able to look through and decide if they would like to
|
||
|
have a printed copy of it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Re retrieval software * "Digital file copyright" * Scanning
|
||
|
rate during production * Autosegmentation * Criteria employed in
|
||
|
selecting books for scanning * Compression and decompression of images *
|
||
|
OCR not precluded *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the question-and-answer period that followed her presentation,
|
||
|
PERSONIUS made these additional points:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Re retrieval software, Cornell is developing a Unix-based server
|
||
|
as well as clients for the server that support multiple platforms
|
||
|
(Macintosh, IBM and Sun workstations), in the hope that people from
|
||
|
any of those platforms will retrieve books; a further operating
|
||
|
assumption is that standard interfaces will be used as much as
|
||
|
possible, where standards can be put in place, because CLASS
|
||
|
considers this retrieval software a library application and would
|
||
|
like to be able to look at material not only at Cornell but at other
|
||
|
institutions.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The phrase "digital file copyright by Cornell University" was
|
||
|
added at the advice of Cornell's legal staff with the caveat that it
|
||
|
probably would not hold up in court. Cornell does not want people
|
||
|
to copy its books and sell them but would like to keep them
|
||
|
available for use in a library environment for library purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* In production the scanner can scan about 300 pages per hour,
|
||
|
capturing 600 dots per inch.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The Xerox software has filters to scan halftone material and avoid
|
||
|
the moire patterns that occur when halftone material is scanned.
|
||
|
Xerox has been working on hardware and software that would enable
|
||
|
the scanner itself to recognize this situation and deal with it
|
||
|
appropriately--a kind of autosegmentation that would enable the
|
||
|
scanner to handle halftone material as well as text on a single page.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The books subjected to the elaborate process described above were
|
||
|
selected because CLASS is a preservation project, with the first 500
|
||
|
books selected coming from Cornell's mathematics collection, because
|
||
|
they were still being heavily used and because, although they were
|
||
|
in need of preservation, the mathematics library and the mathematics
|
||
|
faculty were uncomfortable having them microfilmed. (They wanted a
|
||
|
printed copy.) Thus, these books became a logical choice for this
|
||
|
project. Other books were chosen by the project's selection committees
|
||
|
for experiments with the technology, as well as to meet a demand or need.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Images will be decompressed before they are sent over the line; at
|
||
|
this time they are compressed and sent to the image filing system
|
||
|
and then sent to the printer as compressed images; they are returned
|
||
|
to the workstation as compressed 600-dpi images and the workstation
|
||
|
decompresses and scales them for display--an inefficient way to
|
||
|
access the material though it works quite well for printing and
|
||
|
other purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* CLASS is also decompressing on Macintosh and IBM, a slow process
|
||
|
right now. Eventually, compression and decompression will take
|
||
|
place on an image conversion server. Trade-offs will be made, based
|
||
|
on future performance testing, concerning where the file is
|
||
|
compressed and what resolution image is sent.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* OCR has not been precluded; images are being stored that have been
|
||
|
scanned at a high resolution, which presumably would suit them well
|
||
|
to an OCR process. Because the material being scanned is about 100
|
||
|
years old and was printed with less-than-ideal technologies, very
|
||
|
early and preliminary tests have not produced good results. But the
|
||
|
project is capturing an image that is of sufficient resolution to be
|
||
|
subjected to OCR in the future. Moreover, the system architecture
|
||
|
and the system plan have a logical place to store an OCR image if it
|
||
|
has been captured. But that is not being done now.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION III. DISTRIBUTION, NETWORKS, AND NETWORKING: OPTIONS FOR
|
||
|
DISSEMINATION
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
ZICH * Issues pertaining to CD-ROMs * Options for publishing in CD-ROM *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Robert ZICH, special assistant to the associate librarian for special
|
||
|
projects, Library of Congress, and moderator of this session, first noted
|
||
|
the blessed but somewhat awkward circumstance of having four very
|
||
|
distinguished people representing networks and networking or at least
|
||
|
leaning in that direction, while lacking anyone to speak from the
|
||
|
strongest possible background in CD-ROMs. ZICH expressed the hope that
|
||
|
members of the audience would join the discussion. He stressed the
|
||
|
subtitle of this particular session, "Options for Dissemination," and,
|
||
|
concerning CD-ROMs, the importance of determining when it would be wise
|
||
|
to consider dissemination in CD-ROM versus networks. A shopping list of
|
||
|
issues pertaining to CD-ROMs included: the grounds for selecting
|
||
|
commercial publishers, and in-house publication where possible versus
|
||
|
nonprofit or government publication. A similar list for networks
|
||
|
included: determining when one should consider dissemination through a
|
||
|
network, identifying the mechanisms or entities that exist to place items
|
||
|
on networks, identifying the pool of existing networks, determining how a
|
||
|
producer would choose between networks, and identifying the elements of
|
||
|
a business arrangement in a network.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Options for publishing in CD-ROM: an outside publisher versus
|
||
|
self-publication. If an outside publisher is used, it can be nonprofit,
|
||
|
such as the Government Printing Office (GPO) or the National Technical
|
||
|
Information Service (NTIS), in the case of government. The pros and cons
|
||
|
associated with employing an outside publisher are obvious. Among the
|
||
|
pros, there is no trouble getting accepted. One pays the bill and, in
|
||
|
effect, goes one's way. Among the cons, when one pays an outside
|
||
|
publisher to perform the work, that publisher will perform the work it is
|
||
|
obliged to do, but perhaps without the production expertise and skill in
|
||
|
marketing and dissemination that some would seek. There is the body of
|
||
|
commercial publishers that do possess that kind of expertise in
|
||
|
distribution and marketing but that obviously are selective. In
|
||
|
self-publication, one exercises full control, but then one must handle
|
||
|
matters such as distribution and marketing. Such are some of the options
|
||
|
for publishing in the case of CD-ROM.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the case of technical and design issues, which are also important,
|
||
|
there are many matters which many at the Workshop already knew a good
|
||
|
deal about: retrieval system requirements and costs, what to do about
|
||
|
images, the various capabilities and platforms, the trade-offs between
|
||
|
cost and performance, concerns about local-area networkability,
|
||
|
interoperability, etc.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
LYNCH * Creating networked information is different from using networks
|
||
|
as an access or dissemination vehicle * Networked multimedia on a large
|
||
|
scale does not yet work * Typical CD-ROM publication model a two-edged
|
||
|
sword * Publishing information on a CD-ROM in the present world of
|
||
|
immature standards * Contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing *
|
||
|
Examples demonstrated earlier in the day as a set of insular information
|
||
|
gems * Paramount need to link databases * Layering to become increasingly
|
||
|
necessary * Project NEEDS and the issues of information reuse and active
|
||
|
versus passive use * X-Windows as a way of differentiating between
|
||
|
network access and networked information * Barriers to the distribution
|
||
|
of networked multimedia information * Need for good, real-time delivery
|
||
|
protocols * The question of presentation integrity in client-server
|
||
|
computing in the academic world * Recommendations for producing multimedia
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Clifford LYNCH, director, Library Automation, University of California,
|
||
|
opened his talk with the general observation that networked information
|
||
|
constituted a difficult and elusive topic because it is something just
|
||
|
starting to develop and not yet fully understood. LYNCH contended that
|
||
|
creating genuinely networked information was different from using
|
||
|
networks as an access or dissemination vehicle and was more sophisticated
|
||
|
and more subtle. He invited the members of the audience to extrapolate,
|
||
|
from what they heard about the preceding demonstration projects, to what
|
||
|
sort of a world of electronics information--scholarly, archival,
|
||
|
cultural, etc.--they wished to end up with ten or fifteen years from now.
|
||
|
LYNCH suggested that to extrapolate directly from these projects would
|
||
|
produce unpleasant results.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Putting the issue of CD-ROM in perspective before getting into
|
||
|
generalities on networked information, LYNCH observed that those engaged
|
||
|
in multimedia today who wish to ship a product, so to say, probably do
|
||
|
not have much choice except to use CD-ROM: networked multimedia on a
|
||
|
large scale basically does not yet work because the technology does not
|
||
|
exist. For example, anybody who has tried moving images around over the
|
||
|
Internet knows that this is an exciting touch-and-go process, a
|
||
|
fascinating and fertile area for experimentation, research, and
|
||
|
development, but not something that one can become deeply enthusiastic
|
||
|
about committing to production systems at this time.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This situation will change, LYNCH said. He differentiated CD-ROM from
|
||
|
the practices that have been followed up to now in distributing data on
|
||
|
CD-ROM. For LYNCH the problem with CD-ROM is not its portability or its
|
||
|
slowness but the two-edged sword of having the retrieval application and
|
||
|
the user interface inextricably bound up with the data, which is the
|
||
|
typical CD-ROM publication model. It is not a case of publishing data
|
||
|
but of distributing a typically stand-alone, typically closed system,
|
||
|
all--software, user interface, and data--on a little disk. Hence, all
|
||
|
the between-disk navigational issues as well as the impossibility in most
|
||
|
cases of integrating data on one disk with that on another. Most CD-ROM
|
||
|
retrieval software does not network very gracefully at present. However,
|
||
|
in the present world of immature standards and lack of understanding of
|
||
|
what network information is or what the ground rules are for creating or
|
||
|
using it, publishing information on a CD-ROM does add value in a very
|
||
|
real sense.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH drew a contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing and in doing so
|
||
|
highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. A large
|
||
|
institution such as the University of California has vendors who will
|
||
|
offer to sell information on CD-ROM for a price per year in four digits,
|
||
|
but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on
|
||
|
magnetic tape, regardless of how many people may use it concurrently,
|
||
|
will quote a price in six digits.
|
||
|
|
||
|
What is packaged with the CD-ROM in one sense adds value--a complete
|
||
|
access system, not just raw, unrefined information--although it is not
|
||
|
generally perceived that way. This is because the access software,
|
||
|
although it adds value, is viewed by some people, particularly in the
|
||
|
university environment where there is a very heavy commitment to
|
||
|
networking, as being developed in the wrong direction.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Given that context, LYNCH described the examples demonstrated as a set of
|
||
|
insular information gems--Perseus, for example, offers nicely linked
|
||
|
information, but would be very difficult to integrate with other
|
||
|
databases, that is, to link together seamlessly with other source files
|
||
|
from other sources. It resembles an island, and in this respect is
|
||
|
similar to numerous stand-alone projects that are based on videodiscs,
|
||
|
that is, on the single-workstation concept.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As scholarship evolves in a network environment, the paramount need will
|
||
|
be to link databases. We must link personal databases to public
|
||
|
databases, to group databases, in fairly seamless ways--which is
|
||
|
extremely difficult in the environments under discussion with copies of
|
||
|
databases proliferating all over the place.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The notion of layering also struck LYNCH as lurking in several of the
|
||
|
projects demonstrated. Several databases in a sense constitute
|
||
|
information archives without a significant amount of navigation built in.
|
||
|
Educators, critics, and others will want a layered structure--one that
|
||
|
defines or links paths through the layers to allow users to reach
|
||
|
specific points. In LYNCH's view, layering will become increasingly
|
||
|
necessary, and not just within a single resource but across resources
|
||
|
(e.g., tracing mythology and cultural themes across several classics
|
||
|
databases as well as a database of Renaissance culture). This ability to
|
||
|
organize resources, to build things out of multiple other things on the
|
||
|
network or select pieces of it, represented for LYNCH one of the key
|
||
|
aspects of network information.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Contending that information reuse constituted another significant issue,
|
||
|
LYNCH commended to the audience's attention Project NEEDS (i.e., National
|
||
|
Engineering Education Delivery System). This project's objective is to
|
||
|
produce a database of engineering courseware as well as the components
|
||
|
that can be used to develop new courseware. In a number of the existing
|
||
|
applications, LYNCH said, the issue of reuse (how much one can take apart
|
||
|
and reuse in other applications) was not being well considered. He also
|
||
|
raised the issue of active versus passive use, one aspect of which is
|
||
|
how much information will be manipulated locally by users. Most people,
|
||
|
he argued, may do a little browsing and then will wish to print. LYNCH
|
||
|
was uncertain how these resources would be used by the vast majority of
|
||
|
users in the network environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH next said a few words about X-Windows as a way of differentiating
|
||
|
between network access and networked information. A number of the
|
||
|
applications demonstrated at the Workshop could be rewritten to use X
|
||
|
across the network, so that one could run them from any X-capable device-
|
||
|
-a workstation, an X terminal--and transact with a database across the
|
||
|
network. Although this opens up access a little, assuming one has enough
|
||
|
network to handle it, it does not provide an interface to develop a
|
||
|
program that conveniently integrates information from multiple databases.
|
||
|
X is a viewing technology that has limits. In a real sense, it is just a
|
||
|
graphical version of remote log-in across the network. X-type applications
|
||
|
represent only one step in the progression towards real access.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH next discussed barriers to the distribution of networked multimedia
|
||
|
information. The heart of the problem is a lack of standards to provide
|
||
|
the ability for computers to talk to each other, retrieve information,
|
||
|
and shuffle it around fairly casually. At the moment, little progress is
|
||
|
being made on standards for networked information; for example, present
|
||
|
standards do not cover images, digital voice, and digital video. A
|
||
|
useful tool kit of exchange formats for basic texts is only now being
|
||
|
assembled. The synchronization of content streams (i.e., synchronizing a
|
||
|
voice track to a video track, establishing temporal relations between
|
||
|
different components in a multimedia object) constitutes another issue
|
||
|
for networked multimedia that is just beginning to receive attention.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Underlying network protocols also need some work; good, real-time
|
||
|
delivery protocols on the Internet do not yet exist. In LYNCH's view,
|
||
|
highly important in this context is the notion of networked digital
|
||
|
object IDs, the ability of one object on the network to point to another
|
||
|
object (or component thereof) on the network. Serious bandwidth issues
|
||
|
also exist. LYNCH was uncertain if billion-bit-per-second networks would
|
||
|
prove sufficient if numerous people ran video in parallel.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH concluded by offering an issue for database creators to consider,
|
||
|
as well as several comments about what might constitute good trial
|
||
|
multimedia experiments. In a networked information world the database
|
||
|
builder or service builder (publisher) does not exercise the same
|
||
|
extensive control over the integrity of the presentation; strange
|
||
|
programs "munge" with one's data before the user sees it. Serious
|
||
|
thought must be given to what guarantees integrity of presentation. Part
|
||
|
of that is related to where one draws the boundaries around a networked
|
||
|
information service. This question of presentation integrity in
|
||
|
client-server computing has not been stressed enough in the academic
|
||
|
world, LYNCH argued, though commercial service providers deal with it
|
||
|
regularly.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning multimedia, LYNCH observed that good multimedia at the moment
|
||
|
is hideously expensive to produce. He recommended producing multimedia
|
||
|
with either very high sale value, or multimedia with a very long life
|
||
|
span, or multimedia that will have a very broad usage base and whose
|
||
|
costs therefore can be amortized among large numbers of users. In this
|
||
|
connection, historical and humanistically oriented material may be a good
|
||
|
place to start, because it tends to have a longer life span than much of
|
||
|
the scientific material, as well as a wider user base. LYNCH noted, for
|
||
|
example, that American Memory fits many of the criteria outlined. He
|
||
|
remarked the extensive discussion about bringing the Internet or the
|
||
|
National Research and Education Network (NREN) into the K-12 environment
|
||
|
as a way of helping the American educational system.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH closed by noting that the kinds of applications demonstrated struck
|
||
|
him as excellent justifications of broad-scale networking for K-12, but
|
||
|
that at this time no "killer" application exists to mobilize the K-12
|
||
|
community to obtain connectivity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Dearth of genuinely interesting applications on the network
|
||
|
a slow-changing situation * The issue of the integrity of presentation in
|
||
|
a networked environment * Several reasons why CD-ROM software does not
|
||
|
network *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the discussion period that followed LYNCH's presentation, several
|
||
|
additional points were made.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LYNCH reiterated even more strongly his contention that, historically,
|
||
|
once one goes outside high-end science and the group of those who need
|
||
|
access to supercomputers, there is a great dearth of genuinely
|
||
|
interesting applications on the network. He saw this situation changing
|
||
|
slowly, with some of the scientific databases and scholarly discussion
|
||
|
groups and electronic journals coming on as well as with the availability
|
||
|
of Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) and some of the databases that
|
||
|
are being mounted there. However, many of those things do not seem to
|
||
|
have piqued great popular interest. For instance, most high school
|
||
|
students of LYNCH's acquaintance would not qualify as devotees of serious
|
||
|
molecular biology.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning the issue of the integrity of presentation, LYNCH believed
|
||
|
that a couple of information providers have laid down the law at least on
|
||
|
certain things. For example, his recollection was that the National
|
||
|
Library of Medicine feels strongly that one needs to employ the
|
||
|
identifier field if he or she is to mount a database commercially. The
|
||
|
problem with a real networked environment is that one does not know who
|
||
|
is reformatting and reprocessing one's data when one enters a client
|
||
|
server mode. It becomes anybody's guess, for example, if the network
|
||
|
uses a Z39.50 server, or what clients are doing with one's data. A data
|
||
|
provider can say that his contract will only permit clients to have
|
||
|
access to his data after he vets them and their presentation and makes
|
||
|
certain it suits him. But LYNCH held out little expectation that the
|
||
|
network marketplace would evolve in that way, because it required too
|
||
|
much prior negotiation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
CD-ROM software does not network for a variety of reasons, LYNCH said.
|
||
|
He speculated that CD-ROM publishers are not eager to have their products
|
||
|
really hook into wide area networks, because they fear it will make their
|
||
|
data suppliers nervous. Moreover, until relatively recently, one had to
|
||
|
be rather adroit to run a full TCP/IP stack plus applications on a
|
||
|
PC-size machine, whereas nowadays it is becoming easier as PCs grow
|
||
|
bigger and faster. LYNCH also speculated that software providers had not
|
||
|
heard from their customers until the last year or so, or had not heard
|
||
|
from enough of their customers.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
BESSER * Implications of disseminating images on the network; planning
|
||
|
the distribution of multimedia documents poses two critical
|
||
|
implementation problems * Layered approach represents the way to deal
|
||
|
with users' capabilities * Problems in platform design; file size and its
|
||
|
implications for networking * Transmission of megabyte size images
|
||
|
impractical * Compression and decompression at the user's end * Promising
|
||
|
trends for compression * A disadvantage of using X-Windows * A project at
|
||
|
the Smithsonian that mounts images on several networks *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Howard BESSER, School of Library and Information Science, University of
|
||
|
Pittsburgh, spoke primarily about multimedia, focusing on images and the
|
||
|
broad implications of disseminating them on the network. He argued that
|
||
|
planning the distribution of multimedia documents posed two critical
|
||
|
implementation problems, which he framed in the form of two questions:
|
||
|
1) What platform will one use and what hardware and software will users
|
||
|
have for viewing of the material? and 2) How can one deliver a
|
||
|
sufficiently robust set of information in an accessible format in a
|
||
|
reasonable amount of time? Depending on whether network or CD-ROM is the
|
||
|
medium used, this question raises different issues of storage,
|
||
|
compression, and transmission.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning the design of platforms (e.g., sound, gray scale, simple
|
||
|
color, etc.) and the various capabilities users may have, BESSER
|
||
|
maintained that a layered approach was the way to deal with users'
|
||
|
capabilities. A result would be that users with less powerful
|
||
|
workstations would simply have less functionality. He urged members of
|
||
|
the audience to advocate standards and accompanying software that handle
|
||
|
layered functionality across a wide variety of platforms.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER also addressed problems in platform design, namely, deciding how
|
||
|
large a machine to design for situations when the largest number of users
|
||
|
have the lowest level of the machine, and one desires higher
|
||
|
functionality. BESSER then proceeded to the question of file size and
|
||
|
its implications for networking. He discussed still images in the main.
|
||
|
For example, a digital color image that fills the screen of a standard
|
||
|
mega-pel workstation (Sun or Next) will require one megabyte of storage
|
||
|
for an eight-bit image or three megabytes of storage for a true color or
|
||
|
twenty-four-bit image. Lossless compression algorithms (that is,
|
||
|
computational procedures in which no data is lost in the process of
|
||
|
compressing [and decompressing] an image--the exact bit-representation is
|
||
|
maintained) might bring storage down to a third of a megabyte per image,
|
||
|
but not much further than that. The question of size makes it difficult
|
||
|
to fit an appropriately sized set of these images on a single disk or to
|
||
|
transmit them quickly enough on a network.
|
||
|
|
||
|
With these full screen mega-pel images that constitute a third of a
|
||
|
megabyte, one gets 1,000-3,000 full-screen images on a one-gigabyte disk;
|
||
|
a standard CD-ROM represents approximately 60 percent of that. Storing
|
||
|
images the size of a PC screen (just 8 bit color) increases storage
|
||
|
capacity to 4,000-12,000 images per gigabyte; 60 percent of that gives
|
||
|
one the size of a CD-ROM, which in turn creates a major problem. One
|
||
|
cannot have full-screen, full-color images with lossless compression; one
|
||
|
must compress them or use a lower resolution. For megabyte-size images,
|
||
|
anything slower than a T-1 speed is impractical. For example, on a
|
||
|
fifty-six-kilobaud line, it takes three minutes to transfer a
|
||
|
one-megabyte file, if it is not compressed; and this speed assumes ideal
|
||
|
circumstances (no other user contending for network bandwidth). Thus,
|
||
|
questions of disk access, remote display, and current telephone
|
||
|
connection speed make transmission of megabyte-size images impractical.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER then discussed ways to deal with these large images, for example,
|
||
|
compression and decompression at the user's end. In this connection, the
|
||
|
issues of how much one is willing to lose in the compression process and
|
||
|
what image quality one needs in the first place are unknown. But what is
|
||
|
known is that compression entails some loss of data. BESSER urged that
|
||
|
more studies be conducted on image quality in different situations, for
|
||
|
example, what kind of images are needed for what kind of disciplines, and
|
||
|
what kind of image quality is needed for a browsing tool, an intermediate
|
||
|
viewing tool, and archiving.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER remarked two promising trends for compression: from a technical
|
||
|
perspective, algorithms that use what is called subjective redundancy
|
||
|
employ principles from visual psycho-physics to identify and remove
|
||
|
information from the image that the human eye cannot perceive; from an
|
||
|
interchange and interoperability perspective, the JPEG (i.e., Joint
|
||
|
Photographic Experts Group, an ISO standard) compression algorithms also
|
||
|
offer promise. These issues of compression and decompression, BESSER
|
||
|
argued, resembled those raised earlier concerning the design of different
|
||
|
platforms. Gauging the capabilities of potential users constitutes a
|
||
|
primary goal. BESSER advocated layering or separating the images from
|
||
|
the applications that retrieve and display them, to avoid tying them to
|
||
|
particular software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER detailed several lessons learned from his work at Berkeley with
|
||
|
Imagequery, especially the advantages and disadvantages of using
|
||
|
X-Windows. In the latter category, for example, retrieval is tied
|
||
|
directly to one's data, an intolerable situation in the long run on a
|
||
|
networked system. Finally, BESSER described a project of Jim Wallace at
|
||
|
the Smithsonian Institution, who is mounting images in a extremely
|
||
|
rudimentary way on the Compuserv and Genie networks and is preparing to
|
||
|
mount them on America On Line. Although the average user takes over
|
||
|
thirty minutes to download these images (assuming a fairly fast modem),
|
||
|
nevertheless, images have been downloaded 25,000 times.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER concluded his talk with several comments on the business
|
||
|
arrangement between the Smithsonian and Compuserv. He contended that not
|
||
|
enough is known concerning the value of images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Creating digitized photographic collections nearly
|
||
|
impossible except with large organizations like museums * Need for study
|
||
|
to determine quality of images users will tolerate *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the brief exchange between LESK and BESSER that followed, several
|
||
|
clarifications emerged.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LESK argued that the photographers were far ahead of BESSER: It is
|
||
|
almost impossible to create such digitized photographic collections
|
||
|
except with large organizations like museums, because all the
|
||
|
photographic agencies have been going crazy about this and will not sign
|
||
|
licensing agreements on any sort of reasonable terms. LESK had heard
|
||
|
that National Geographic, for example, had tried to buy the right to use
|
||
|
some image in some kind of educational production for $100 per image, but
|
||
|
the photographers will not touch it. They want accounting and payment
|
||
|
for each use, which cannot be accomplished within the system. BESSER
|
||
|
responded that a consortium of photographers, headed by a former National
|
||
|
Geographic photographer, had started assembling its own collection of
|
||
|
electronic reproductions of images, with the money going back to the
|
||
|
cooperative.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LESK contended that BESSER was unnecessarily pessimistic about multimedia
|
||
|
images, because people are accustomed to low-quality images, particularly
|
||
|
from video. BESSER urged the launching of a study to determine what
|
||
|
users would tolerate, what they would feel comfortable with, and what
|
||
|
absolutely is the highest quality they would ever need. Conceding that
|
||
|
he had adopted a dire tone in order to arouse people about the issue,
|
||
|
BESSER closed on a sanguine note by saying that he would not be in this
|
||
|
business if he did not think that things could be accomplished.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
LARSEN * Issues of scalability and modularity * Geometric growth of the
|
||
|
Internet and the role played by layering * Basic functions sustaining
|
||
|
this growth * A library's roles and functions in a network environment *
|
||
|
Effects of implementation of the Z39.50 protocol for information
|
||
|
retrieval on the library system * The trade-off between volumes of data
|
||
|
and its potential usage * A snapshot of current trends *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ronald LARSEN, associate director for information technology, University
|
||
|
of Maryland at College Park, first addressed the issues of scalability
|
||
|
and modularity. He noted the difficulty of anticipating the effects of
|
||
|
orders-of-magnitude growth, reflecting on the twenty years of experience
|
||
|
with the Arpanet and Internet. Recalling the day's demonstrations of
|
||
|
CD-ROM and optical disk material, he went on to ask if the field has yet
|
||
|
learned how to scale new systems to enable delivery and dissemination
|
||
|
across large-scale networks.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN focused on the geometric growth of the Internet from its inception
|
||
|
circa 1969 to the present, and the adjustments required to respond to
|
||
|
that rapid growth. To illustrate the issue of scalability, LARSEN
|
||
|
considered computer networks as including three generic components:
|
||
|
computers, network communication nodes, and communication media. Each
|
||
|
component scales (e.g., computers range from PCs to supercomputers;
|
||
|
network nodes scale from interface cards in a PC through sophisticated
|
||
|
routers and gateways; and communication media range from 2,400-baud
|
||
|
dial-up facilities through 4.5-Mbps backbone links, and eventually to
|
||
|
multigigabit-per-second communication lines), and architecturally, the
|
||
|
components are organized to scale hierarchically from local area networks
|
||
|
to international-scale networks. Such growth is made possible by
|
||
|
building layers of communication protocols, as BESSER pointed out.
|
||
|
By layering both physically and logically, a sense of scalability is
|
||
|
maintained from local area networks in offices, across campuses, through
|
||
|
bridges, routers, campus backbones, fiber-optic links, etc., up into
|
||
|
regional networks and ultimately into national and international
|
||
|
networks.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN then illustrated the geometric growth over a two-year period--
|
||
|
through September 1991--of the number of networks that comprise the
|
||
|
Internet. This growth has been sustained largely by the availability of
|
||
|
three basic functions: electronic mail, file transfer (ftp), and remote
|
||
|
log-on (telnet). LARSEN also reviewed the growth in the kind of traffic
|
||
|
that occurs on the network. Network traffic reflects the joint contributions
|
||
|
of a larger population of users and increasing use per user. Today one sees
|
||
|
serious applications involving moving images across the network--a rarity
|
||
|
ten years ago. LARSEN recalled and concurred with BESSER's main point
|
||
|
that the interesting problems occur at the application level.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN then illustrated a model of a library's roles and functions in a
|
||
|
network environment. He noted, in particular, the placement of on-line
|
||
|
catalogues onto the network and patrons obtaining access to the library
|
||
|
increasingly through local networks, campus networks, and the Internet.
|
||
|
LARSEN supported LYNCH's earlier suggestion that we need to address
|
||
|
fundamental questions of networked information in order to build
|
||
|
environments that scale in the information sense as well as in the
|
||
|
physical sense.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN supported the role of the library system as the access point into
|
||
|
the nation's electronic collections. Implementation of the Z39.50
|
||
|
protocol for information retrieval would make such access practical and
|
||
|
feasible. For example, this would enable patrons in Maryland to search
|
||
|
California libraries, or other libraries around the world that are
|
||
|
conformant with Z39.50 in a manner that is familiar to University of
|
||
|
Maryland patrons. This client-server model also supports moving beyond
|
||
|
secondary content into primary content. (The notion of how one links
|
||
|
from secondary content to primary content, LARSEN said, represents a
|
||
|
fundamental problem that requires rigorous thought.) After noting
|
||
|
numerous network experiments in accessing full-text materials, including
|
||
|
projects supporting the ordering of materials across the network, LARSEN
|
||
|
revisited the issue of transmitting high-density, high-resolution color
|
||
|
images across the network and the large amounts of bandwidth they
|
||
|
require. He went on to address the bandwidth and synchronization
|
||
|
problems inherent in sending full-motion video across the network.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN illustrated the trade-off between volumes of data in bytes or
|
||
|
orders of magnitude and the potential usage of that data. He discussed
|
||
|
transmission rates (particularly, the time it takes to move various forms
|
||
|
of information), and what one could do with a network supporting
|
||
|
multigigabit-per-second transmission. At the moment, the network
|
||
|
environment includes a composite of data-transmission requirements,
|
||
|
volumes and forms, going from steady to bursty (high-volume) and from
|
||
|
very slow to very fast. This aggregate must be considered in the design,
|
||
|
construction, and operation of multigigabyte networks.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN's objective is to use the networks and library systems now being
|
||
|
constructed to increase access to resources wherever they exist, and
|
||
|
thus, to evolve toward an on-line electronic virtual library.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LARSEN concluded by offering a snapshot of current trends: continuing
|
||
|
geometric growth in network capacity and number of users; slower
|
||
|
development of applications; and glacial development and adoption of
|
||
|
standards. The challenge is to design and develop each new application
|
||
|
system with network access and scalability in mind.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
BROWNRIGG * Access to the Internet cannot be taken for granted * Packet
|
||
|
radio and the development of MELVYL in 1980-81 in the Division of Library
|
||
|
Automation at the University of California * Design criteria for packet
|
||
|
radio * A demonstration project in San Diego and future plans * Spread
|
||
|
spectrum * Frequencies at which the radios will run and plans to
|
||
|
reimplement the WAIS server software in the public domain * Need for an
|
||
|
infrastructure of radios that do not move around *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Edwin BROWNRIGG, executive director, Memex Research Institute, first
|
||
|
polled the audience in order to seek out regular users of the Internet as
|
||
|
well as those planning to use it some time in the future. With nearly
|
||
|
everybody in the room falling into one category or the other, BROWNRIGG
|
||
|
made a point re access, namely that numerous individuals, especially those
|
||
|
who use the Internet every day, take for granted their access to it, the
|
||
|
speeds with which they are connected, and how well it all works.
|
||
|
However, as BROWNRIGG discovered between 1987 and 1989 in Australia,
|
||
|
if one wants access to the Internet but cannot afford it or has some
|
||
|
physical boundary that prevents her or him from gaining access, it can
|
||
|
be extremely frustrating. He suggested that because of economics and
|
||
|
physical barriers we were beginning to create a world of haves and have-nots
|
||
|
in the process of scholarly communication, even in the United States.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BROWNRIGG detailed the development of MELVYL in academic year 1980-81 in
|
||
|
the Division of Library Automation at the University of California, in
|
||
|
order to underscore the issue of access to the system, which at the
|
||
|
outset was extremely limited. In short, the project needed to build a
|
||
|
network, which at that time entailed use of satellite technology, that is,
|
||
|
putting earth stations on campus and also acquiring some terrestrial links
|
||
|
from the State of California's microwave system. The installation of
|
||
|
satellite links, however, did not solve the problem (which actually
|
||
|
formed part of a larger problem involving politics and financial resources).
|
||
|
For while the project team could get a signal onto a campus, it had no means
|
||
|
of distributing the signal throughout the campus. The solution involved
|
||
|
adopting a recent development in wireless communication called packet radio,
|
||
|
which combined the basic notion of packet-switching with radio. The project
|
||
|
used this technology to get the signal from a point on campus where it
|
||
|
came down, an earth station for example, into the libraries, because it
|
||
|
found that wiring the libraries, especially the older marble buildings,
|
||
|
would cost $2,000-$5,000 per terminal.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BROWNRIGG noted that, ten years ago, the project had neither the public
|
||
|
policy nor the technology that would have allowed it to use packet radio
|
||
|
in any meaningful way. Since then much had changed. He proceeded to
|
||
|
detail research and development of the technology, how it is being
|
||
|
deployed in California, and what direction he thought it would take.
|
||
|
The design criteria are to produce a high-speed, one-time, low-cost,
|
||
|
high-quality, secure, license-free device (packet radio) that one can
|
||
|
plug in and play today, forget about it, and have access to the Internet.
|
||
|
By high speed, BROWNRIGG meant 1 megabyte and 1.5 megabytes. Those units
|
||
|
have been built, he continued, and are in the process of being
|
||
|
type-certified by an independent underwriting laboratory so that they can
|
||
|
be type-licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. As is the
|
||
|
case with citizens band, one will be able to purchase a unit and not have
|
||
|
to worry about applying for a license.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The basic idea, BROWNRIGG elaborated, is to take high-speed radio data
|
||
|
transmission and create a backbone network that at certain strategic
|
||
|
points in the network will "gateway" into a medium-speed packet radio
|
||
|
(i.e., one that runs at 38.4 kilobytes), so that perhaps by 1994-1995
|
||
|
people, like those in the audience for the price of a VCR could purchase
|
||
|
a medium-speed radio for the office or home, have full network connectivity
|
||
|
to the Internet, and partake of all its services, with no need for an FCC
|
||
|
license and no regular bill from the local common carrier. BROWNRIGG
|
||
|
presented several details of a demonstration project currently taking
|
||
|
place in San Diego and described plans, pending funding, to install a
|
||
|
full-bore network in the San Francisco area. This network will have 600
|
||
|
nodes running at backbone speeds, and 100 of these nodes will be libraries,
|
||
|
which in turn will be the gateway ports to the 38.4 kilobyte radios that
|
||
|
will give coverage for the neighborhoods surrounding the libraries.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BROWNRIGG next explained Part 15.247, a new rule within Title 47 of the
|
||
|
Code of Federal Regulations enacted by the FCC in 1985. This rule
|
||
|
challenged the industry, which has only now risen to the occasion, to
|
||
|
build a radio that would run at no more than one watt of output power and
|
||
|
use a fairly exotic method of modulating the radio wave called spread
|
||
|
spectrum. Spread spectrum in fact permits the building of networks so
|
||
|
that numerous data communications can occur simultaneously, without
|
||
|
interfering with each other, within the same wide radio channel.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BROWNRIGG explained that the frequencies at which the radios would run
|
||
|
are very short wave signals. They are well above standard microwave and
|
||
|
radar. With a radio wave that small, one watt becomes a tremendous punch
|
||
|
per bit and thus makes transmission at reasonable speed possible. In
|
||
|
order to minimize the potential for congestion, the project is
|
||
|
undertaking to reimplement software which has been available in the
|
||
|
networking business and is taken for granted now, for example, TCP/IP,
|
||
|
routing algorithms, bridges, and gateways. In addition, the project
|
||
|
plans to take the WAIS server software in the public domain and
|
||
|
reimplement it so that one can have a WAIS server on a Mac instead of a
|
||
|
Unix machine. The Memex Research Institute believes that libraries, in
|
||
|
particular, will want to use the WAIS servers with packet radio. This
|
||
|
project, which has a team of about twelve people, will run through 1993
|
||
|
and will include the 100 libraries already mentioned as well as other
|
||
|
professionals such as those in the medical profession, engineering, and
|
||
|
law. Thus, the need is to create an infrastructure of radios that do not
|
||
|
move around, which, BROWNRIGG hopes, will solve a problem not only for
|
||
|
libraries but for individuals who, by and large today, do not have access
|
||
|
to the Internet from their homes and offices.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Project operating frequencies *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During a brief discussion period, which also concluded the day's
|
||
|
proceedings, BROWNRIGG stated that the project was operating in four
|
||
|
frequencies. The slow speed is operating at 435 megahertz, and it would
|
||
|
later go up to 920 megahertz. With the high-speed frequency, the
|
||
|
one-megabyte radios will run at 2.4 gigabits, and 1.5 will run at 5.7.
|
||
|
At 5.7, rain can be a factor, but it would have to be tropical rain,
|
||
|
unlike what falls in most parts of the United States.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION IV. IMAGE CAPTURE, TEXT CAPTURE, OVERVIEW OF TEXT AND
|
||
|
IMAGE STORAGE FORMATS
|
||
|
|
||
|
William HOOTON, vice president of operations, I-NET, moderated this session.
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
KENNEY * Factors influencing development of CXP * Advantages of using
|
||
|
digital technology versus photocopy and microfilm * A primary goal of
|
||
|
CXP; publishing challenges * Characteristics of copies printed * Quality
|
||
|
of samples achieved in image capture * Several factors to be considered
|
||
|
in choosing scanning * Emphasis of CXP on timely and cost-effective
|
||
|
production of black-and-white printed facsimiles * Results of producing
|
||
|
microfilm from digital files * Advantages of creating microfilm * Details
|
||
|
concerning production * Costs * Role of digital technology in library
|
||
|
preservation *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Anne KENNEY, associate director, Department of Preservation and
|
||
|
Conservation, Cornell University, opened her talk by observing that the
|
||
|
Cornell Xerox Project (CXP) has been guided by the assumption that the
|
||
|
ability to produce printed facsimiles or to replace paper with paper
|
||
|
would be important, at least for the present generation of users and
|
||
|
equipment. She described three factors that influenced development of
|
||
|
the project: 1) Because the project has emphasized the preservation of
|
||
|
deteriorating brittle books, the quality of what was produced had to be
|
||
|
sufficiently high to return a paper replacement to the shelf. CXP was
|
||
|
only interested in using: 2) a system that was cost-effective, which
|
||
|
meant that it had to be cost-competitive with the processes currently
|
||
|
available, principally photocopy and microfilm, and 3) new or currently
|
||
|
available product hardware and software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY described the advantages that using digital technology offers over
|
||
|
both photocopy and microfilm: 1) The potential exists to create a higher
|
||
|
quality reproduction of a deteriorating original than conventional
|
||
|
light-lens technology. 2) Because a digital image is an encoded
|
||
|
representation, it can be reproduced again and again with no resulting
|
||
|
loss of quality, as opposed to the situation with light-lens processes,
|
||
|
in which there is discernible difference between a second and a
|
||
|
subsequent generation of an image. 3) A digital image can be manipulated
|
||
|
in a number of ways to improve image capture; for example, Xerox has
|
||
|
developed a windowing application that enables one to capture a page
|
||
|
containing both text and illustrations in a manner that optimizes the
|
||
|
reproduction of both. (With light-lens technology, one must choose which
|
||
|
to optimize, text or the illustration; in preservation microfilming, the
|
||
|
current practice is to shoot an illustrated page twice, once to highlight
|
||
|
the text and the second time to provide the best capture for the
|
||
|
illustration.) 4) A digital image can also be edited, density levels
|
||
|
adjusted to remove underlining and stains, and to increase legibility for
|
||
|
faint documents. 5) On-screen inspection can take place at the time of
|
||
|
initial setup and adjustments made prior to scanning, factors that
|
||
|
substantially reduce the number of retakes required in quality control.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A primary goal of CXP has been to evaluate the paper output printed on
|
||
|
the Xerox DocuTech, a high-speed printer that produces 600-dpi pages from
|
||
|
scanned images at a rate of 135 pages a minute. KENNEY recounted several
|
||
|
publishing challenges to represent faithful and legible reproductions of
|
||
|
the originals that the 600-dpi copy for the most part successfully
|
||
|
captured. For example, many of the deteriorating volumes in the project
|
||
|
were heavily illustrated with fine line drawings or halftones or came in
|
||
|
languages such as Japanese, in which the buildup of characters comprised
|
||
|
of varying strokes is difficult to reproduce at lower resolutions; a
|
||
|
surprising number of them came with annotations and mathematical
|
||
|
formulas, which it was critical to be able to duplicate exactly.
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY noted that 1) the copies are being printed on paper that meets the
|
||
|
ANSI standards for performance, 2) the DocuTech printer meets the machine
|
||
|
and toner requirements for proper adhesion of print to page, as described
|
||
|
by the National Archives, and thus 3) paper product is considered to be
|
||
|
the archival equivalent of preservation photocopy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY then discussed several samples of the quality achieved in the
|
||
|
project that had been distributed in a handout, for example, a copy of a
|
||
|
print-on-demand version of the 1911 Reed lecture on the steam turbine,
|
||
|
which contains halftones, line drawings, and illustrations embedded in
|
||
|
text; the first four loose pages in the volume compared the capture
|
||
|
capabilities of scanning to photocopy for a standard test target, the
|
||
|
IEEE standard 167A 1987 test chart. In all instances scanning proved
|
||
|
superior to photocopy, though only slightly more so in one.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Conceding the simplistic nature of her review of the quality of scanning
|
||
|
to photocopy, KENNEY described it as one representation of the kinds of
|
||
|
settings that could be used with scanning capabilities on the equipment
|
||
|
CXP uses. KENNEY also pointed out that CXP investigated the quality
|
||
|
achieved with binary scanning only, and noted the great promise in gray
|
||
|
scale and color scanning, whose advantages and disadvantages need to be
|
||
|
examined. She argued further that scanning resolutions and file formats
|
||
|
can represent a complex trade-off between the time it takes to capture
|
||
|
material, file size, fidelity to the original, and on-screen display; and
|
||
|
printing and equipment availability. All these factors must be taken
|
||
|
into consideration.
|
||
|
|
||
|
CXP placed primary emphasis on the production in a timely and
|
||
|
cost-effective manner of printed facsimiles that consisted largely of
|
||
|
black-and-white text. With binary scanning, large files may be
|
||
|
compressed efficiently and in a lossless manner (i.e., no data is lost in
|
||
|
the process of compressing [and decompressing] an image--the exact
|
||
|
bit-representation is maintained) using Group 4 CCITT (i.e., the French
|
||
|
acronym for International Consultative Committee for Telegraph and
|
||
|
Telephone) compression. CXP was getting compression ratios of about
|
||
|
forty to one. Gray-scale compression, which primarily uses JPEG, is much
|
||
|
less economical and can represent a lossy compression (i.e., not
|
||
|
lossless), so that as one compresses and decompresses, the illustration
|
||
|
is subtly changed. While binary files produce a high-quality printed
|
||
|
version, it appears 1) that other combinations of spatial resolution with
|
||
|
gray and/or color hold great promise as well, and 2) that gray scale can
|
||
|
represent a tremendous advantage for on-screen viewing. The quality
|
||
|
associated with binary and gray scale also depends on the equipment used.
|
||
|
For instance, binary scanning produces a much better copy on a binary
|
||
|
printer.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Among CXP's findings concerning the production of microfilm from digital
|
||
|
files, KENNEY reported that the digital files for the same Reed lecture
|
||
|
were used to produce sample film using an electron beam recorder. The
|
||
|
resulting film was faithful to the image capture of the digital files,
|
||
|
and while CXP felt that the text and image pages represented in the Reed
|
||
|
lecture were superior to that of the light-lens film, the resolution
|
||
|
readings for the 600 dpi were not as high as standard microfilming.
|
||
|
KENNEY argued that the standards defined for light-lens technology are
|
||
|
not totally transferable to a digital environment. Moreover, they are
|
||
|
based on definition of quality for a preservation copy. Although making
|
||
|
this case will prove to be a long, uphill struggle, CXP plans to continue
|
||
|
to investigate the issue over the course of the next year.
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY concluded this portion of her talk with a discussion of the
|
||
|
advantages of creating film: it can serve as a primary backup and as a
|
||
|
preservation master to the digital file; it could then become the print
|
||
|
or production master and service copies could be paper, film, optical
|
||
|
disks, magnetic media, or on-screen display.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finally, KENNEY presented details re production:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Development and testing of a moderately-high resolution production
|
||
|
scanning workstation represented a third goal of CXP; to date, 1,000
|
||
|
volumes have been scanned, or about 300,000 images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The resulting digital files are stored and used to produce
|
||
|
hard-copy replacements for the originals and additional prints on
|
||
|
demand; although the initial costs are high, scanning technology
|
||
|
offers an affordable means for reformatting brittle material.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* A technician in production mode can scan 300 pages per hour when
|
||
|
performing single-sheet scanning, which is a necessity when working
|
||
|
with truly brittle paper; this figure is expected to increase
|
||
|
significantly with subsequent iterations of the software from Xerox;
|
||
|
a three-month time-and-cost study of scanning found that the average
|
||
|
300-page book would take about an hour and forty minutes to scan
|
||
|
(this figure included the time for setup, which involves keying in
|
||
|
primary bibliographic data, going into quality control mode to
|
||
|
define page size, establishing front-to-back registration, and
|
||
|
scanning sample pages to identify a default range of settings for
|
||
|
the entire book--functions not dissimilar to those performed by
|
||
|
filmers or those preparing a book for photocopy).
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The final step in the scanning process involved rescans, which
|
||
|
happily were few and far between, representing well under 1 percent
|
||
|
of the total pages scanned.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In addition to technician time, CXP costed out equipment, amortized over
|
||
|
four years, the cost of storing and refreshing the digital files every
|
||
|
four years, and the cost of printing and binding, book-cloth binding, a
|
||
|
paper reproduction. The total amounted to a little under $65 per single
|
||
|
300-page volume, with 30 percent overhead included--a figure competitive
|
||
|
with the prices currently charged by photocopy vendors.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Of course, with scanning, in addition to the paper facsimile, one is left
|
||
|
with a digital file from which subsequent copies of the book can be
|
||
|
produced for a fraction of the cost of photocopy, with readers afforded
|
||
|
choices in the form of these copies.
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY concluded that digital technology offers an electronic means for a
|
||
|
library preservation effort to pay for itself. If a brittle-book program
|
||
|
included the means of disseminating reprints of books that are in demand
|
||
|
by libraries and researchers alike, the initial investment in capture
|
||
|
could be recovered and used to preserve additional but less popular
|
||
|
books. She disclosed that an economic model for a self-sustaining
|
||
|
program could be developed for CXP's report to the Commission on
|
||
|
Preservation and Access (CPA).
|
||
|
|
||
|
KENNEY stressed that the focus of CXP has been on obtaining high quality
|
||
|
in a production environment. The use of digital technology is viewed as
|
||
|
an affordable alternative to other reformatting options.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
ANDRE * Overview and history of NATDP * Various agricultural CD-ROM
|
||
|
products created inhouse and by service bureaus * Pilot project on
|
||
|
Internet transmission * Additional products in progress *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Pamela ANDRE, associate director for automation, National Agricultural
|
||
|
Text Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL),
|
||
|
presented an overview of NATDP, which has been underway at NAL the last
|
||
|
four years, before Judith ZIDAR discussed the technical details. ANDRE
|
||
|
defined agricultural information as a broad range of material going from
|
||
|
basic and applied research in the hard sciences to the one-page pamphlets
|
||
|
that are distributed by the cooperative state extension services on such
|
||
|
things as how to grow blueberries.
|
||
|
|
||
|
NATDP began in late 1986 with a meeting of representatives from the
|
||
|
land-grant library community to deal with the issue of electronic
|
||
|
information. NAL and forty-five of these libraries banded together to
|
||
|
establish this project--to evaluate the technology for converting what
|
||
|
were then source documents in paper form into electronic form, to provide
|
||
|
access to that digital information, and then to distribute it.
|
||
|
Distributing that material to the community--the university community as
|
||
|
well as the extension service community, potentially down to the county
|
||
|
level--constituted the group's chief concern.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Since January 1988 (when the microcomputer-based scanning system was
|
||
|
installed at NAL), NATDP has done a variety of things, concerning which
|
||
|
ZIDAR would provide further details. For example, the first technology
|
||
|
considered in the project's discussion phase was digital videodisc, which
|
||
|
indicates how long ago it was conceived.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Over the four years of this project, four separate CD-ROM products on
|
||
|
four different agricultural topics were created, two at a
|
||
|
scanning-and-OCR station installed at NAL, and two by service bureaus.
|
||
|
Thus, NATDP has gained comparative information in terms of those relative
|
||
|
costs. Each of these products contained the full ASCII text as well as
|
||
|
page images of the material, or between 4,000 and 6,000 pages of material
|
||
|
on these disks. Topics included aquaculture, food, agriculture and
|
||
|
science (i.e., international agriculture and research), acid rain, and
|
||
|
Agent Orange, which was the final product distributed (approximately
|
||
|
eighteen months before the Workshop).
|
||
|
|
||
|
The third phase of NATDP focused on delivery mechanisms other than
|
||
|
CD-ROM. At the suggestion of Clifford LYNCH, who was a technical
|
||
|
consultant to the project at this point, NATDP became involved with the
|
||
|
Internet and initiated a project with the help of North Carolina State
|
||
|
University, in which fourteen of the land-grant university libraries are
|
||
|
transmitting digital images over the Internet in response to interlibrary
|
||
|
loan requests--a topic for another meeting. At this point, the pilot
|
||
|
project had been completed for about a year and the final report would be
|
||
|
available shortly after the Workshop. In the meantime, the project's
|
||
|
success had led to its extension. (ANDRE noted that one of the first
|
||
|
things done under the program title was to select a retrieval package to
|
||
|
use with subsequent products; Windows Personal Librarian was the package
|
||
|
of choice after a lengthy evaluation.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
Three additional products had been planned and were in progress:
|
||
|
|
||
|
1) An arrangement with the American Society of Agronomy--a
|
||
|
professional society that has published the Agronomy Journal since
|
||
|
about 1908--to scan and create bit-mapped images of its journal.
|
||
|
ASA granted permission first to put and then to distribute this
|
||
|
material in electronic form, to hold it at NAL, and to use these
|
||
|
electronic images as a mechanism to deliver documents or print out
|
||
|
material for patrons, among other uses. Effectively, NAL has the
|
||
|
right to use this material in support of its program.
|
||
|
(Significantly, this arrangement offers a potential cooperative
|
||
|
model for working with other professional societies in agriculture
|
||
|
to try to do the same thing--put the journals of particular interest
|
||
|
to agriculture research into electronic form.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
2) An extension of the earlier product on aquaculture.
|
||
|
|
||
|
3) The George Washington Carver Papers--a joint project with
|
||
|
Tuskegee University to scan and convert from microfilm some 3,500
|
||
|
images of Carver's papers, letters, and drawings.
|
||
|
|
||
|
It was anticipated that all of these products would appear no more than
|
||
|
six months after the Workshop.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
ZIDAR * (A separate arena for scanning) * Steps in creating a database *
|
||
|
Image capture, with and without performing OCR * Keying in tracking data
|
||
|
* Scanning, with electronic and manual tracking * Adjustments during
|
||
|
scanning process * Scanning resolutions * Compression * De-skewing and
|
||
|
filtering * Image capture from microform: the papers and letters of
|
||
|
George Washington Carver * Equipment used for a scanning system *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Judith ZIDAR, coordinator, National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program
|
||
|
(NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL), illustrated the technical
|
||
|
details of NATDP, including her primary responsibility, scanning and
|
||
|
creating databases on a topic and putting them on CD-ROM.
|
||
|
|
||
|
(ZIDAR remarked a separate arena from the CD-ROM projects, although the
|
||
|
processing of the material is nearly identical, in which NATDP is also
|
||
|
scanning material and loading it on a Next microcomputer, which in turn
|
||
|
is linked to NAL's integrated library system. Thus, searches in NAL's
|
||
|
bibliographic database will enable people to pull up actual page images
|
||
|
and text for any documents that have been entered.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
In accordance with the session's topic, ZIDAR focused her illustrated
|
||
|
talk on image capture, offering a primer on the three main steps in the
|
||
|
process: 1) assemble the printed publications; 2) design the database
|
||
|
(database design occurs in the process of preparing the material for
|
||
|
scanning; this step entails reviewing and organizing the material,
|
||
|
defining the contents--what will constitute a record, what kinds of
|
||
|
fields will be captured in terms of author, title, etc.); 3) perform a
|
||
|
certain amount of markup on the paper publications. NAL performs this
|
||
|
task record by record, preparing work sheets or some other sort of
|
||
|
tracking material and designing descriptors and other enhancements to be
|
||
|
added to the data that will not be captured from the printed publication.
|
||
|
Part of this process also involves determining NATDP's file and directory
|
||
|
structure: NATDP attempts to avoid putting more than approximately 100
|
||
|
images in a directory, because placing more than that on a CD-ROM would
|
||
|
reduce the access speed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This up-front process takes approximately two weeks for a
|
||
|
6,000-7,000-page database. The next step is to capture the page images.
|
||
|
How long this process takes is determined by the decision whether or not
|
||
|
to perform OCR. Not performing OCR speeds the process, whereas text
|
||
|
capture requires greater care because of the quality of the image: it
|
||
|
has to be straighter and allowance must be made for text on a page, not
|
||
|
just for the capture of photographs.
|
||
|
|
||
|
NATDP keys in tracking data, that is, a standard bibliographic record
|
||
|
including the title of the book and the title of the chapter, which will
|
||
|
later either become the access information or will be attached to the
|
||
|
front of a full-text record so that it is searchable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Images are scanned from a bound or unbound publication, chiefly from
|
||
|
bound publications in the case of NATDP, however, because often they are
|
||
|
the only copies and the publications are returned to the shelves. NATDP
|
||
|
usually scans one record at a time, because its database tracking system
|
||
|
tracks the document in that way and does not require further logical
|
||
|
separating of the images. After performing optical character
|
||
|
recognition, NATDP moves the images off the hard disk and maintains a
|
||
|
volume sheet. Though the system tracks electronically, all the
|
||
|
processing steps are also tracked manually with a log sheet.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR next illustrated the kinds of adjustments that one can make when
|
||
|
scanning from paper and microfilm, for example, redoing images that need
|
||
|
special handling, setting for dithering or gray scale, and adjusting for
|
||
|
brightness or for the whole book at one time.
|
||
|
|
||
|
NATDP is scanning at 300 dots per inch, a standard scanning resolution.
|
||
|
Though adequate for capturing text that is all of a standard size, 300
|
||
|
dpi is unsuitable for any kind of photographic material or for very small
|
||
|
text. Many scanners allow for different image formats, TIFF, of course,
|
||
|
being a de facto standard. But if one intends to exchange images with
|
||
|
other people, the ability to scan other image formats, even if they are
|
||
|
less common, becomes highly desirable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
CCITT Group 4 is the standard compression for normal black-and-white
|
||
|
images, JPEG for gray scale or color. ZIDAR recommended 1) using the
|
||
|
standard compressions, particularly if one attempts to make material
|
||
|
available and to allow users to download images and reuse them from
|
||
|
CD-ROMs; and 2) maintaining the ability to output an uncompressed image,
|
||
|
because in image exchange uncompressed images are more likely to be able
|
||
|
to cross platforms.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR emphasized the importance of de-skewing and filtering as
|
||
|
requirements on NATDP's upgraded system. For instance, scanning bound
|
||
|
books, particularly books published by the federal government whose pages
|
||
|
are skewed, and trying to scan them straight if OCR is to be performed,
|
||
|
is extremely time-consuming. The same holds for filtering of
|
||
|
poor-quality or older materials.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR described image capture from microform, using as an example three
|
||
|
reels from a sixty-seven-reel set of the papers and letters of George
|
||
|
Washington Carver that had been produced by Tuskegee University. These
|
||
|
resulted in approximately 3,500 images, which NATDP had had scanned by
|
||
|
its service contractor, Science Applications International Corporation
|
||
|
(SAIC). NATDP also created bibliographic records for access. (NATDP did
|
||
|
not have such specialized equipment as a microfilm scanner.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Unfortunately, the process of scanning from microfilm was not an
|
||
|
unqualified success, ZIDAR reported: because microfilm frame sizes vary,
|
||
|
occasionally some frames were missed, which without spending much time
|
||
|
and money could not be recaptured.
|
||
|
|
||
|
OCR could not be performed from the scanned images of the frames. The
|
||
|
bleeding in the text simply output text, when OCR was run, that could not
|
||
|
even be edited. NATDP tested for negative versus positive images,
|
||
|
landscape versus portrait orientation, and single- versus dual-page
|
||
|
microfilm, none of which seemed to affect the quality of the image; but
|
||
|
also on none of them could OCR be performed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In selecting the microfilm they would use, therefore, NATDP had other
|
||
|
factors in mind. ZIDAR noted two factors that influenced the quality of
|
||
|
the images: 1) the inherent quality of the original and 2) the amount of
|
||
|
size reduction on the pages.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Carver papers were selected because they are informative and visually
|
||
|
interesting, treat a single subject, and are valuable in their own right.
|
||
|
The images were scanned and divided into logical records by SAIC, then
|
||
|
delivered, and loaded onto NATDP's system, where bibliographic
|
||
|
information taken directly from the images was added. Scanning was
|
||
|
completed in summer 1991 and by the end of summer 1992 the disk was
|
||
|
scheduled to be published.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Problems encountered during processing included the following: Because
|
||
|
the microfilm scanning had to be done in a batch, adjustment for
|
||
|
individual page variations was not possible. The frame size varied on
|
||
|
account of the nature of the material, and therefore some of the frames
|
||
|
were missed while others were just partial frames. The only way to go
|
||
|
back and capture this material was to print out the page with the
|
||
|
microfilm reader from the missing frame and then scan it in from the
|
||
|
page, which was extremely time-consuming. The quality of the images
|
||
|
scanned from the printout of the microfilm compared unfavorably with that
|
||
|
of the original images captured directly from the microfilm. The
|
||
|
inability to perform OCR also was a major disappointment. At the time,
|
||
|
computer output microfilm was unavailable to test.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The equipment used for a scanning system was the last topic addressed by
|
||
|
ZIDAR. The type of equipment that one would purchase for a scanning
|
||
|
system included: a microcomputer, at least a 386, but preferably a 486;
|
||
|
a large hard disk, 380 megabyte at minimum; a multi-tasking operating
|
||
|
system that allows one to run some things in batch in the background
|
||
|
while scanning or doing text editing, for example, Unix or OS/2 and,
|
||
|
theoretically, Windows; a high-speed scanner and scanning software that
|
||
|
allows one to make the various adjustments mentioned earlier; a
|
||
|
high-resolution monitor (150 dpi ); OCR software and hardware to perform
|
||
|
text recognition; an optical disk subsystem on which to archive all the
|
||
|
images as the processing is done; file management and tracking software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR opined that the software one purchases was more important than the
|
||
|
hardware and might also cost more than the hardware, but it was likely to
|
||
|
prove critical to the success or failure of one's system. In addition to
|
||
|
a stand-alone scanning workstation for image capture, then, text capture
|
||
|
requires one or two editing stations networked to this scanning station
|
||
|
to perform editing. Editing the text takes two or three times as long as
|
||
|
capturing the images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finally, ZIDAR stressed the importance of buying an open system that allows
|
||
|
for more than one vendor, complies with standards, and can be upgraded.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
WATERS *Yale University Library's master plan to convert microfilm to
|
||
|
digital imagery (POB) * The place of electronic tools in the library of
|
||
|
the future * The uses of images and an image library * Primary input from
|
||
|
preservation microfilm * Features distinguishing POB from CXP and key
|
||
|
hypotheses guiding POB * Use of vendor selection process to facilitate
|
||
|
organizational work * Criteria for selecting vendor * Finalists and
|
||
|
results of process for Yale * Key factor distinguishing vendors *
|
||
|
Components, design principles, and some estimated costs of POB * Role of
|
||
|
preservation materials in developing imaging market * Factors affecting
|
||
|
quality and cost * Factors affecting the usability of complex documents
|
||
|
in image form *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Donald WATERS, head of the Systems Office, Yale University Library,
|
||
|
reported on the progress of a master plan for a project at Yale to
|
||
|
convert microfilm to digital imagery, Project Open Book (POB). Stating
|
||
|
that POB was in an advanced stage of planning, WATERS detailed, in
|
||
|
particular, the process of selecting a vendor partner and several key
|
||
|
issues under discussion as Yale prepares to move into the project itself.
|
||
|
He commented first on the vision that serves as the context of POB and
|
||
|
then described its purpose and scope.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WATERS sees the library of the future not necessarily as an electronic
|
||
|
library but as a place that generates, preserves, and improves for its
|
||
|
clients ready access to both intellectual and physical recorded
|
||
|
knowledge. Electronic tools must find a place in the library in the
|
||
|
context of this vision. Several roles for electronic tools include
|
||
|
serving as: indirect sources of electronic knowledge or as "finding"
|
||
|
aids (the on-line catalogues, the article-level indices, registers for
|
||
|
documents and archives); direct sources of recorded knowledge; full-text
|
||
|
images; and various kinds of compound sources of recorded knowledge (the
|
||
|
so-called compound documents of Hypertext, mixed text and image,
|
||
|
mixed-text image format, and multimedia).
|
||
|
|
||
|
POB is looking particularly at images and an image library, the uses to
|
||
|
which images will be put (e.g., storage, printing, browsing, and then use
|
||
|
as input for other processes), OCR as a subsequent process to image
|
||
|
capture, or creating an image library, and also possibly generating
|
||
|
microfilm.
|
||
|
|
||
|
While input will come from a variety of sources, POB is considering
|
||
|
especially input from preservation microfilm. A possible outcome is that
|
||
|
the film and paper which provide the input for the image library
|
||
|
eventually may go off into remote storage, and that the image library may
|
||
|
be the primary access tool.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The purpose and scope of POB focus on imaging. Though related to CXP,
|
||
|
POB has two features which distinguish it: 1) scale--conversion of
|
||
|
10,000 volumes into digital image form; and 2) source--conversion from
|
||
|
microfilm. Given these features, several key working hypotheses guide
|
||
|
POB, including: 1) Since POB is using microfilm, it is not concerned with
|
||
|
the image library as a preservation medium. 2) Digital imagery can improve
|
||
|
access to recorded knowledge through printing and network distribution at
|
||
|
a modest incremental cost of microfilm. 3) Capturing and storing documents
|
||
|
in a digital image form is necessary to further improvements in access.
|
||
|
(POB distinguishes between the imaging, digitizing process and OCR,
|
||
|
which at this stage it does not plan to perform.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
Currently in its first or organizational phase, POB found that it could
|
||
|
use a vendor selection process to facilitate a good deal of the
|
||
|
organizational work (e.g., creating a project team and advisory board,
|
||
|
confirming the validity of the plan, establishing the cost of the project
|
||
|
and a budget, selecting the materials to convert, and then raising the
|
||
|
necessary funds).
|
||
|
|
||
|
POB developed numerous selection criteria, including: a firm committed
|
||
|
to image-document management, the ability to serve as systems integrator
|
||
|
in a large-scale project over several years, interest in developing the
|
||
|
requisite software as a standard rather than a custom product, and a
|
||
|
willingness to invest substantial resources in the project itself.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Two vendors, DEC and Xerox, were selected as finalists in October 1991,
|
||
|
and with the support of the Commission on Preservation and Access, each
|
||
|
was commissioned to generate a detailed requirements analysis for the
|
||
|
project and then to submit a formal proposal for the completion of the
|
||
|
project, which included a budget and costs. The terms were that POB would
|
||
|
pay the loser. The results for Yale of involving a vendor included:
|
||
|
broad involvement of Yale staff across the board at a relatively low
|
||
|
cost, which may have long-term significance in carrying out the project
|
||
|
(twenty-five to thirty university people are engaged in POB); better
|
||
|
understanding of the factors that affect corporate response to markets
|
||
|
for imaging products; a competitive proposal; and a more sophisticated
|
||
|
view of the imaging markets.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The most important factor that distinguished the vendors under
|
||
|
consideration was their identification with the customer. The size and
|
||
|
internal complexity of the company also was an important factor. POB was
|
||
|
looking at large companies that had substantial resources. In the end,
|
||
|
the process generated for Yale two competitive proposals, with Xerox's
|
||
|
the clear winner. WATERS then described the components of the proposal,
|
||
|
the design principles, and some of the costs estimated for the process.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Components are essentially four: a conversion subsystem, a
|
||
|
network-accessible storage subsystem for 10,000 books (and POB expects
|
||
|
200 to 600 dpi storage), browsing stations distributed on the campus
|
||
|
network, and network access to the image printers.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Among the design principles, POB wanted conversion at the highest
|
||
|
possible resolution. Assuming TIFF files, TIFF files with Group 4
|
||
|
compression, TCP/IP, and ethernet network on campus, POB wanted a
|
||
|
client-server approach with image documents distributed to the
|
||
|
workstations and made accessible through native workstation interfaces
|
||
|
such as Windows. POB also insisted on a phased approach to
|
||
|
implementation: 1) a stand-alone, single-user, low-cost entry into the
|
||
|
business with a workstation focused on conversion and allowing POB to
|
||
|
explore user access; 2) movement into a higher-volume conversion with
|
||
|
network-accessible storage and multiple access stations; and 3) a
|
||
|
high-volume conversion, full-capacity storage, and multiple browsing
|
||
|
stations distributed throughout the campus.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The costs proposed for start-up assumed the existence of the Yale network
|
||
|
and its two DocuTech image printers. Other start-up costs are estimated
|
||
|
at $1 million over the three phases. At the end of the project, the annual
|
||
|
operating costs estimated primarily for the software and hardware proposed
|
||
|
come to about $60,000, but these exclude costs for labor needed in the
|
||
|
conversion process, network and printer usage, and facilities management.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finally, the selection process produced for Yale a more sophisticated
|
||
|
view of the imaging markets: the management of complex documents in
|
||
|
image form is not a preservation problem, not a library problem, but a
|
||
|
general problem in a broad, general industry. Preservation materials are
|
||
|
useful for developing that market because of the qualities of the
|
||
|
material. For example, much of it is out of copyright. The resolution
|
||
|
of key issues such as the quality of scanning and image browsing also
|
||
|
will affect development of that market.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The technology is readily available but changing rapidly. In this
|
||
|
context of rapid change, several factors affect quality and cost, to
|
||
|
which POB intends to pay particular attention, for example, the various
|
||
|
levels of resolution that can be achieved. POB believes it can bring
|
||
|
resolution up to 600 dpi, but an interpolation process from 400 to 600 is
|
||
|
more likely. The variation quality in microfilm will prove to be a
|
||
|
highly important factor. POB may reexamine the standards used to film in
|
||
|
the first place by looking at this process as a follow-on to microfilming.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Other important factors include: the techniques available to the
|
||
|
operator for handling material, the ways of integrating quality control
|
||
|
into the digitizing work flow, and a work flow that includes indexing and
|
||
|
storage. POB's requirement was to be able to deal with quality control
|
||
|
at the point of scanning. Thus, thanks to Xerox, POB anticipates having
|
||
|
a mechanism which will allow it not only to scan in batch form, but to
|
||
|
review the material as it goes through the scanner and control quality
|
||
|
from the outset.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The standards for measuring quality and costs depend greatly on the uses
|
||
|
of the material, including subsequent OCR, storage, printing, and
|
||
|
browsing. But especially at issue for POB is the facility for browsing.
|
||
|
This facility, WATERS said, is perhaps the weakest aspect of imaging
|
||
|
technology and the most in need of development.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A variety of factors affect the usability of complex documents in image
|
||
|
form, among them: 1) the ability of the system to handle the full range
|
||
|
of document types, not just monographs but serials, multi-part
|
||
|
monographs, and manuscripts; 2) the location of the database of record
|
||
|
for bibliographic information about the image document, which POB wants
|
||
|
to enter once and in the most useful place, the on-line catalog; 3) a
|
||
|
document identifier for referencing the bibliographic information in one
|
||
|
place and the images in another; 4) the technique for making the basic
|
||
|
internal structure of the document accessible to the reader; and finally,
|
||
|
5) the physical presentation on the CRT of those documents. POB is ready
|
||
|
to complete this phase now. One last decision involves deciding which
|
||
|
material to scan.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * TIFF files constitute de facto standard * NARA's experience
|
||
|
with image conversion software and text conversion * RFC 1314 *
|
||
|
Considerable flux concerning available hardware and software solutions *
|
||
|
NAL through-put rate during scanning * Window management questions *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the question-and-answer period that followed WATERS's presentation,
|
||
|
the following points emerged:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* ZIDAR's statement about using TIFF files as a standard meant de
|
||
|
facto standard. This is what most people use and typically exchange
|
||
|
with other groups, across platforms, or even occasionally across
|
||
|
display software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* HOLMES commented on the unsuccessful experience of NARA in
|
||
|
attempting to run image-conversion software or to exchange between
|
||
|
applications: What are supposedly TIFF files go into other software
|
||
|
that is supposed to be able to accept TIFF but cannot recognize the
|
||
|
format and cannot deal with it, and thus renders the exchange
|
||
|
useless. Re text conversion, he noted the different recognition
|
||
|
rates obtained by substituting the make and model of scanners in
|
||
|
NARA's recent test of an "intelligent" character-recognition product
|
||
|
for a new company. In the selection of hardware and software,
|
||
|
HOLMES argued, software no longer constitutes the overriding factor
|
||
|
it did until about a year ago; rather it is perhaps important to
|
||
|
look at both now.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Danny Cohen and Alan Katz of the University of Southern California
|
||
|
Information Sciences Institute began circulating as an Internet RFC
|
||
|
(RFC 1314) about a month ago a standard for a TIFF interchange
|
||
|
format for Internet distribution of monochrome bit-mapped images,
|
||
|
which LYNCH said he believed would be used as a de facto standard.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* FLEISCHHAUER's impression from hearing these reports and thinking
|
||
|
about AM's experience was that there is considerable flux concerning
|
||
|
available hardware and software solutions. HOOTON agreed and
|
||
|
commented at the same time on ZIDAR's statement that the equipment
|
||
|
employed affects the results produced. One cannot draw a complete
|
||
|
conclusion by saying it is difficult or impossible to perform OCR
|
||
|
from scanning microfilm, for example, with that device, that set of
|
||
|
parameters, and system requirements, because numerous other people
|
||
|
are accomplishing just that, using other components, perhaps.
|
||
|
HOOTON opined that both the hardware and the software were highly
|
||
|
important. Most of the problems discussed today have been solved in
|
||
|
numerous different ways by other people. Though it is good to be
|
||
|
cognizant of various experiences, this is not to say that it will
|
||
|
always be thus.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* At NAL, the through-put rate of the scanning process for paper,
|
||
|
page by page, performing OCR, ranges from 300 to 600 pages per day;
|
||
|
not performing OCR is considerably faster, although how much faster
|
||
|
is not known. This is for scanning from bound books, which is much
|
||
|
slower.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* WATERS commented on window management questions: DEC proposed an
|
||
|
X-Windows solution which was problematical for two reasons. One was
|
||
|
POB's requirement to be able to manipulate images on the workstation
|
||
|
and bring them down to the workstation itself and the other was
|
||
|
network usage.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
THOMA * Illustration of deficiencies in scanning and storage process *
|
||
|
Image quality in this process * Different costs entailed by better image
|
||
|
quality * Techniques for overcoming various de-ficiencies: fixed
|
||
|
thresholding, dynamic thresholding, dithering, image merge * Page edge
|
||
|
effects *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
George THOMA, chief, Communications Engineering Branch, National Library
|
||
|
of Medicine (NLM), illustrated several of the deficiencies discussed by
|
||
|
the previous speakers. He introduced the topic of special problems by
|
||
|
noting the advantages of electronic imaging. For example, it is regenerable
|
||
|
because it is a coded file, and real-time quality control is possible with
|
||
|
electronic capture, whereas in photographic capture it is not.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One of the difficulties discussed in the scanning and storage process was
|
||
|
image quality which, without belaboring the obvious, means different
|
||
|
things for maps, medical X-rays, or broadcast television. In the case of
|
||
|
documents, THOMA said, image quality boils down to legibility of the
|
||
|
textual parts, and fidelity in the case of gray or color photo print-type
|
||
|
material. Legibility boils down to scan density, the standard in most
|
||
|
cases being 300 dpi. Increasing the resolution with scanners that
|
||
|
perform 600 or 1200 dpi, however, comes at a cost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Better image quality entails at least four different kinds of costs: 1)
|
||
|
equipment costs, because the CCD (i.e., charge-couple device) with
|
||
|
greater number of elements costs more; 2) time costs that translate to
|
||
|
the actual capture costs, because manual labor is involved (the time is
|
||
|
also dependent on the fact that more data has to be moved around in the
|
||
|
machine in the scanning or network devices that perform the scanning as
|
||
|
well as the storage); 3) media costs, because at high resolutions larger
|
||
|
files have to be stored; and 4) transmission costs, because there is just
|
||
|
more data to be transmitted.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But while resolution takes care of the issue of legibility in image
|
||
|
quality, other deficiencies have to do with contrast and elements on the
|
||
|
page scanned or the image that needed to be removed or clarified. Thus,
|
||
|
THOMA proceeded to illustrate various deficiencies, how they are
|
||
|
manifested, and several techniques to overcome them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Fixed thresholding was the first technique described, suitable for
|
||
|
black-and-white text, when the contrast does not vary over the page. One
|
||
|
can have many different threshold levels in scanning devices. Thus,
|
||
|
THOMA offered an example of extremely poor contrast, which resulted from
|
||
|
the fact that the stock was a heavy red. This is the sort of image that
|
||
|
when microfilmed fails to provide any legibility whatsoever. Fixed
|
||
|
thresholding is the way to change the black-to-red contrast to the
|
||
|
desired black-to-white contrast.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Other examples included material that had been browned or yellowed by
|
||
|
age. This was also a case of contrast deficiency, and correction was
|
||
|
done by fixed thresholding. A final example boils down to the same
|
||
|
thing, slight variability, but it is not significant. Fixed thresholding
|
||
|
solves this problem as well. The microfilm equivalent is certainly legible,
|
||
|
but it comes with dark areas. Though THOMA did not have a slide of the
|
||
|
microfilm in this case, he did show the reproduced electronic image.
|
||
|
|
||
|
When one has variable contrast over a page or the lighting over the page
|
||
|
area varies, especially in the case where a bound volume has light
|
||
|
shining on it, the image must be processed by a dynamic thresholding
|
||
|
scheme. One scheme, dynamic averaging, allows the threshold level not to
|
||
|
be fixed but to be recomputed for every pixel from the neighboring
|
||
|
characteristics. The neighbors of a pixel determine where the threshold
|
||
|
should be set for that pixel.
|
||
|
|
||
|
THOMA showed an example of a page that had been made deficient by a
|
||
|
variety of techniques, including a burn mark, coffee stains, and a yellow
|
||
|
marker. Application of a fixed-thresholding scheme, THOMA argued, might
|
||
|
take care of several deficiencies on the page but not all of them.
|
||
|
Performing the calculation for a dynamic threshold setting, however,
|
||
|
removes most of the deficiencies so that at least the text is legible.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Another problem is representing a gray level with black-and-white pixels
|
||
|
by a process known as dithering or electronic screening. But dithering
|
||
|
does not provide good image quality for pure black-and-white textual
|
||
|
material. THOMA illustrated this point with examples. Although its
|
||
|
suitability for photoprint is the reason for electronic screening or
|
||
|
dithering, it cannot be used for every compound image. In the document
|
||
|
that was distributed by CXP, THOMA noticed that the dithered image of the
|
||
|
IEEE test chart evinced some deterioration in the text. He presented an
|
||
|
extreme example of deterioration in the text in which compounded
|
||
|
documents had to be set right by other techniques. The technique
|
||
|
illustrated by the present example was an image merge in which the page
|
||
|
is scanned twice and the settings go from fixed threshold to the
|
||
|
dithering matrix; the resulting images are merged to give the best
|
||
|
results with each technique.
|
||
|
|
||
|
THOMA illustrated how dithering is also used in nonphotographic or
|
||
|
nonprint materials with an example of a grayish page from a medical text,
|
||
|
which was reproduced to show all of the gray that appeared in the
|
||
|
original. Dithering provided a reproduction of all the gray in the
|
||
|
original of another example from the same text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
THOMA finally illustrated the problem of bordering, or page-edge,
|
||
|
effects. Books and bound volumes that are placed on a photocopy machine
|
||
|
or a scanner produce page-edge effects that are undesirable for two
|
||
|
reasons: 1) the aesthetics of the image; after all, if the image is to
|
||
|
be preserved, one does not necessarily want to keep all of its
|
||
|
deficiencies; 2) compression (with the bordering problem THOMA
|
||
|
illustrated, the compression ratio deteriorated tremendously). One way
|
||
|
to eliminate this more serious problem is to have the operator at the
|
||
|
point of scanning window the part of the image that is desirable and
|
||
|
automatically turn all of the pixels out of that picture to white.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER * AM's experience with scanning bound materials * Dithering
|
||
|
*
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Carl FLEISCHHAUER, coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress,
|
||
|
reported AM's experience with scanning bound materials, which he likened
|
||
|
to the problems involved in using photocopying machines. Very few
|
||
|
devices in the industry offer book-edge scanning, let alone book cradles.
|
||
|
The problem may be unsolvable, FLEISCHHAUER said, because a large enough
|
||
|
market does not exist for a preservation-quality scanner. AM is using a
|
||
|
Kurzweil scanner, which is a book-edge scanner now sold by Xerox.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Devoting the remainder of his brief presentation to dithering,
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER related AM's experience with a contractor who was using
|
||
|
unsophisticated equipment and software to reduce moire patterns from
|
||
|
printed halftones. AM took the same image and used the dithering
|
||
|
algorithm that forms part of the same Kurzweil Xerox scanner; it
|
||
|
disguised moire patterns much more effectively.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER also observed that dithering produces a binary file which is
|
||
|
useful for numerous purposes, for example, printing it on a laser printer
|
||
|
without having to "re-halftone" it. But it tends to defeat efficient
|
||
|
compression, because the very thing that dithers to reduce moire patterns
|
||
|
also tends to work against compression schemes. AM thought the
|
||
|
difference in image quality was worth it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Relative use as a criterion for POB's selection of books to
|
||
|
be converted into digital form *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the discussion period, WATERS noted that one of the criteria for
|
||
|
selecting books among the 10,000 to be converted into digital image form
|
||
|
would be how much relative use they would receive--a subject still
|
||
|
requiring evaluation. The challenge will be to understand whether
|
||
|
coherent bodies of material will increase usage or whether POB should
|
||
|
seek material that is being used, scan that, and make it more accessible.
|
||
|
POB might decide to digitize materials that are already heavily used, in
|
||
|
order to make them more accessible and decrease wear on them. Another
|
||
|
approach would be to provide a large body of intellectually coherent
|
||
|
material that may be used more in digital form than it is currently used
|
||
|
in microfilm. POB would seek material that was out of copyright.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
BARONAS * Origin and scope of AIIM * Types of documents produced in
|
||
|
AIIM's standards program * Domain of AIIM's standardization work * AIIM's
|
||
|
structure * TC 171 and MS23 * Electronic image management standards *
|
||
|
Categories of EIM standardization where AIIM standards are being
|
||
|
developed *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jean BARONAS, senior manager, Department of Standards and Technology,
|
||
|
Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), described the
|
||
|
not-for-profit association and the national and international programs
|
||
|
for standardization in which AIIM is active.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Accredited for twenty-five years as the nation's standards development
|
||
|
organization for document image management, AIIM began life in a library
|
||
|
community developing microfilm standards. Today the association
|
||
|
maintains both its library and business-image management standardization
|
||
|
activities--and has moved into electronic image-management
|
||
|
standardization (EIM).
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS defined the program's scope. AIIM deals with: 1) the
|
||
|
terminology of standards and of the technology it uses; 2) methods of
|
||
|
measurement for the systems, as well as quality; 3) methodologies for
|
||
|
users to evaluate and measure quality; 4) the features of apparatus used
|
||
|
to manage and edit images; and 5) the procedures used to manage images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS noted that three types of documents are produced in the AIIM
|
||
|
standards program: the first two, accredited by the American National
|
||
|
Standards Institute (ANSI), are standards and standard recommended
|
||
|
practices. Recommended practices differ from standards in that they
|
||
|
contain more tutorial information. A technical report is not an ANSI
|
||
|
standard. Because AIIM's policies and procedures for developing
|
||
|
standards are approved by ANSI, its standards are labeled ANSI/AIIM,
|
||
|
followed by the number and title of the standard.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS then illustrated the domain of AIIM's standardization work. For
|
||
|
example, AIIM is the administrator of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group
|
||
|
(TAG) to the International Standards Organization's (ISO) technical
|
||
|
committee, TC l7l Micrographics and Optical Memories for Document and
|
||
|
Image Recording, Storage, and Use. AIIM officially works through ANSI in
|
||
|
the international standardization process.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS described AIIM's structure, including its board of directors, its
|
||
|
standards board of twelve individuals active in the image-management
|
||
|
industry, its strategic planning and legal admissibility task forces, and
|
||
|
its National Standards Council, which is comprised of the members of a
|
||
|
number of organizations who vote on every AIIM standard before it is
|
||
|
published. BARONAS pointed out that AIIM's liaisons deal with numerous
|
||
|
other standards developers, including the optical disk community, office
|
||
|
and publishing systems, image-codes-and-character set committees, and the
|
||
|
National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS illustrated the procedures of TC l7l, which covers all aspects of
|
||
|
image management. When AIIM's national program has conceptualized a new
|
||
|
project, it is usually submitted to the international level, so that the
|
||
|
member countries of TC l7l can simultaneously work on the development of
|
||
|
the standard or the technical report. BARONAS also illustrated a classic
|
||
|
microfilm standard, MS23, which deals with numerous imaging concepts that
|
||
|
apply to electronic imaging. Originally developed in the l970s, revised
|
||
|
in the l980s, and revised again in l991, this standard is scheduled for
|
||
|
another revision. MS23 is an active standard whereby users may propose
|
||
|
new density ranges and new methods of evaluating film images in the
|
||
|
standard's revision.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS detailed several electronic image-management standards, for
|
||
|
instance, ANSI/AIIM MS44, a quality-control guideline for scanning 8.5"
|
||
|
by 11" black-and-white office documents. This standard is used with the
|
||
|
IEEE fax image--a continuous tone photographic image with gray scales,
|
||
|
text, and several continuous tone pictures--and AIIM test target number
|
||
|
2, a representative document used in office document management.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BARONAS next outlined the four categories of EIM standardization in which
|
||
|
AIIM standards are being developed: transfer and retrieval, evaluation,
|
||
|
optical disc and document scanning applications, and design and
|
||
|
conversion of documents. She detailed several of the main projects of
|
||
|
each: 1) in the category of image transfer and retrieval, a bi-level
|
||
|
image transfer format, ANSI/AIIM MS53, which is a proposed standard that
|
||
|
describes a file header for image transfer between unlike systems when
|
||
|
the images are compressed using G3 and G4 compression; 2) the category of
|
||
|
image evaluation, which includes the AIIM-proposed TR26 tutorial on image
|
||
|
resolution (this technical report will treat the differences and
|
||
|
similarities between classical or photographic and electronic imaging);
|
||
|
3) design and conversion, which includes a proposed technical report
|
||
|
called "Forms Design Optimization for EIM" (this report considers how
|
||
|
general-purpose business forms can be best designed so that scanning is
|
||
|
optimized; reprographic characteristics such as type, rules, background,
|
||
|
tint, and color will likewise be treated in the technical report); 4)
|
||
|
disk and document scanning applications includes a project a) on planning
|
||
|
platters and disk management, b) on generating an application profile for
|
||
|
EIM when images are stored and distributed on CD-ROM, and c) on
|
||
|
evaluating SCSI2, and how a common command set can be generated for SCSI2
|
||
|
so that document scanners are more easily integrated. (ANSI/AIIM MS53
|
||
|
will also apply to compressed images.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
BATTIN * The implications of standards for preservation * A major
|
||
|
obstacle to successful cooperation * A hindrance to access in the digital
|
||
|
environment * Standards a double-edged sword for those concerned with the
|
||
|
preservation of the human record * Near-term prognosis for reliable
|
||
|
archival standards * Preservation concerns for electronic media * Need
|
||
|
for reconceptualizing our preservation principles * Standards in the real
|
||
|
world and the politics of reproduction * Need to redefine the concept of
|
||
|
archival and to begin to think in terms of life cycles * Cooperation and
|
||
|
the La Guardia Eight * Concerns generated by discussions on the problems
|
||
|
of preserving text and image * General principles to be adopted in a
|
||
|
world without standards *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Patricia BATTIN, president, the Commission on Preservation and Access
|
||
|
(CPA), addressed the implications of standards for preservation. She
|
||
|
listed several areas where the library profession and the analog world of
|
||
|
the printed book had made enormous contributions over the past hundred
|
||
|
years--for example, in bibliographic formats, binding standards, and, most
|
||
|
important, in determining what constitutes longevity or archival quality.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Although standards have lightened the preservation burden through the
|
||
|
development of national and international collaborative programs,
|
||
|
nevertheless, a pervasive mistrust of other people's standards remains a
|
||
|
major obstacle to successful cooperation, BATTIN said.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The zeal to achieve perfection, regardless of the cost, has hindered
|
||
|
rather than facilitated access in some instances, and in the digital
|
||
|
environment, where no real standards exist, has brought an ironically
|
||
|
just reward.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BATTIN argued that standards are a double-edged sword for those concerned
|
||
|
with the preservation of the human record, that is, the provision of
|
||
|
access to recorded knowledge in a multitude of media as far into the
|
||
|
future as possible. Standards are essential to facilitate
|
||
|
interconnectivity and access, but, BATTIN said, as LYNCH pointed out
|
||
|
yesterday, if set too soon they can hinder creativity, expansion of
|
||
|
capability, and the broadening of access. The characteristics of
|
||
|
standards for digital imagery differ radically from those for analog
|
||
|
imagery. And the nature of digital technology implies continuing
|
||
|
volatility and change. To reiterate, precipitous standard-setting can
|
||
|
inhibit creativity, but delayed standard-setting results in chaos.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Since in BATTIN'S opinion the near-term prognosis for reliable archival
|
||
|
standards, as defined by librarians in the analog world, is poor, two
|
||
|
alternatives remain: standing pat with the old technology, or
|
||
|
reconceptualizing.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Preservation concerns for electronic media fall into two general domains.
|
||
|
One is the continuing assurance of access to knowledge originally
|
||
|
generated, stored, disseminated, and used in electronic form. This
|
||
|
domain contains several subdivisions, including 1) the closed,
|
||
|
proprietary systems discussed the previous day, bundled information such
|
||
|
as electronic journals and government agency records, and electronically
|
||
|
produced or captured raw data; and 2) the application of digital
|
||
|
technologies to the reformatting of materials originally published on a
|
||
|
deteriorating analog medium such as acid paper or videotape.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The preservation of electronic media requires a reconceptualizing of our
|
||
|
preservation principles during a volatile, standardless transition which
|
||
|
may last far longer than any of us envision today. BATTIN urged the
|
||
|
necessity of shifting focus from assessing, measuring, and setting
|
||
|
standards for the permanence of the medium to the concept of managing
|
||
|
continuing access to information stored on a variety of media and
|
||
|
requiring a variety of ever-changing hardware and software for access--a
|
||
|
fundamental shift for the library profession.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BATTIN offered a primer on how to move forward with reasonable confidence
|
||
|
in a world without standards. Her comments fell roughly into two sections:
|
||
|
1) standards in the real world and 2) the politics of reproduction.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In regard to real-world standards, BATTIN argued the need to redefine the
|
||
|
concept of archive and to begin to think in terms of life cycles. In
|
||
|
the past, the naive assumption that paper would last forever produced a
|
||
|
cavalier attitude toward life cycles. The transient nature of the
|
||
|
electronic media has compelled people to recognize and accept upfront the
|
||
|
concept of life cycles in place of permanency.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Digital standards have to be developed and set in a cooperative context
|
||
|
to ensure efficient exchange of information. Moreover, during this
|
||
|
transition period, greater flexibility concerning how concepts such as
|
||
|
backup copies and archival copies in the CXP are defined is necessary,
|
||
|
or the opportunity to move forward will be lost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In terms of cooperation, particularly in the university setting, BATTIN
|
||
|
also argued the need to avoid going off in a hundred different
|
||
|
directions. The CPA has catalyzed a small group of universities called
|
||
|
the La Guardia Eight--because La Guardia Airport is where meetings take
|
||
|
place--Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Penn State, Tennessee,
|
||
|
Stanford, and USC, to develop a digital preservation consortium to look
|
||
|
at all these issues and develop de facto standards as we move along,
|
||
|
instead of waiting for something that is officially blessed. Continuing
|
||
|
to apply analog values and definitions of standards to the digital
|
||
|
environment, BATTIN said, will effectively lead to forfeiture of the
|
||
|
benefits of digital technology to research and scholarship.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Under the second rubric, the politics of reproduction, BATTIN reiterated
|
||
|
an oft-made argument concerning the electronic library, namely, that it
|
||
|
is more difficult to transform than to create, and nowhere is that belief
|
||
|
expressed more dramatically than in the conversion of brittle books to
|
||
|
new media. Preserving information published in electronic media involves
|
||
|
making sure the information remains accessible and that digital
|
||
|
information is not lost through reproduction. In the analog world of
|
||
|
photocopies and microfilm, the issue of fidelity to the original becomes
|
||
|
paramount, as do issues of "Whose fidelity?" and "Whose original?"
|
||
|
|
||
|
BATTIN elaborated these arguments with a few examples from a recent study
|
||
|
conducted by the CPA on the problems of preserving text and image.
|
||
|
Discussions with scholars, librarians, and curators in a variety of
|
||
|
disciplines dependent on text and image generated a variety of concerns,
|
||
|
for example: 1) Copy what is, not what the technology is capable of.
|
||
|
This is very important for the history of ideas. Scholars wish to know
|
||
|
what the author saw and worked from. And make available at the
|
||
|
workstation the opportunity to erase all the defects and enhance the
|
||
|
presentation. 2) The fidelity of reproduction--what is good enough, what
|
||
|
can we afford, and the difference it makes--issues of subjective versus
|
||
|
objective resolution. 3) The differences between primary and secondary
|
||
|
users. Restricting the definition of primary user to the one in whose
|
||
|
discipline the material has been published runs one headlong into the
|
||
|
reality that these printed books have had a host of other users from a
|
||
|
host of other disciplines, who not only were looking for very different
|
||
|
things, but who also shared values very different from those of the
|
||
|
primary user. 4) The relationship of the standard of reproduction to new
|
||
|
capabilities of scholarship--the browsing standard versus an archival
|
||
|
standard. How good must the archival standard be? Can a distinction be
|
||
|
drawn between potential users in setting standards for reproduction?
|
||
|
Archival storage, use copies, browsing copies--ought an attempt to set
|
||
|
standards even be made? 5) Finally, costs. How much are we prepared to
|
||
|
pay to capture absolute fidelity? What are the trade-offs between vastly
|
||
|
enhanced access, degrees of fidelity, and costs?
|
||
|
|
||
|
These standards, BATTIN concluded, serve to complicate further the
|
||
|
reproduction process, and add to the long list of technical standards
|
||
|
that are necessary to ensure widespread access. Ways to articulate and
|
||
|
analyze the costs that are attached to the different levels of standards
|
||
|
must be found.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Given the chaos concerning standards, which promises to linger for the
|
||
|
foreseeable future, BATTIN urged adoption of the following general
|
||
|
principles:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Strive to understand the changing information requirements of
|
||
|
scholarly disciplines as more and more technology is integrated into
|
||
|
the process of research and scholarly communication in order to meet
|
||
|
future scholarly needs, not to build for the past. Capture
|
||
|
deteriorating information at the highest affordable resolution, even
|
||
|
though the dissemination and display technologies will lag.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Develop cooperative mechanisms to foster agreement on protocols
|
||
|
for document structure and other interchange mechanisms necessary
|
||
|
for widespread dissemination and use before official standards are
|
||
|
set.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Accept that, in a transition period, de facto standards will have
|
||
|
to be developed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Capture information in a way that keeps all options open and
|
||
|
provides for total convertibility: OCR, scanning of microfilm,
|
||
|
producing microfilm from scanned documents, etc.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Work closely with the generators of information and the builders
|
||
|
of networks and databases to ensure that continuing accessibility is
|
||
|
a primary concern from the beginning.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Piggyback on standards under development for the broad market, and
|
||
|
avoid library-specific standards; work with the vendors, in order to
|
||
|
take advantage of that which is being standardized for the rest of
|
||
|
the world.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Concentrate efforts on managing permanence in the digital world,
|
||
|
rather than perfecting the longevity of a particular medium.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Additional comments on TIFF *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the brief discussion period that followed BATTIN's presentation,
|
||
|
BARONAS explained that TIFF was not developed in collaboration with or
|
||
|
under the auspices of AIIM. TIFF is a company product, not a standard,
|
||
|
is owned by two corporations, and is always changing. BARONAS also
|
||
|
observed that ANSI/AIIM MS53, a bi-level image file transfer format that
|
||
|
allows unlike systems to exchange images, is compatible with TIFF as well
|
||
|
as with DEC's architecture and IBM's MODCA/IOCA.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
HOOTON * Several questions to be considered in discussing text conversion
|
||
|
*
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOOTON introduced the final topic, text conversion, by noting that it is
|
||
|
becoming an increasingly important part of the imaging business. Many
|
||
|
people now realize that it enhances their system to be able to have more
|
||
|
and more character data as part of their imaging system. Re the issue of
|
||
|
OCR versus rekeying, HOOTON posed several questions: How does one get
|
||
|
text into computer-readable form? Does one use automated processes?
|
||
|
Does one attempt to eliminate the use of operators where possible?
|
||
|
Standards for accuracy, he said, are extremely important: it makes a
|
||
|
major difference in cost and time whether one sets as a standard 98.5
|
||
|
percent acceptance or 99.5 percent. He mentioned outsourcing as a
|
||
|
possibility for converting text. Finally, what one does with the image
|
||
|
to prepare it for the recognition process is also important, he said,
|
||
|
because such preparation changes how recognition is viewed, as well as
|
||
|
facilitates recognition itself.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
LESK * Roles of participants in CORE * Data flow * The scanning process *
|
||
|
The image interface * Results of experiments involving the use of
|
||
|
electronic resources and traditional paper copies * Testing the issue of
|
||
|
serendipity * Conclusions *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
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.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
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 *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
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 problems in dealing with service bureaus, for example,
|
||
|
their inability to perform text conversion from the kind of microfilm
|
||
|
that LC uses for preservation purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But quality control, in ERWAY's experience, was the most time-consuming
|
||
|
aspect of contracting out conversion. AM has been attempting to perform
|
||
|
a 10-percent quality review, looking at either every tenth document or
|
||
|
every tenth page to make certain that the service bureaus are maintaining
|
||
|
99.95 percent accuracy. But even if they are complying with the
|
||
|
requirement for accuracy, finding errors produces a desire to correct
|
||
|
them and, in turn, to clean up the whole collection, which defeats the
|
||
|
purpose to some extent. Even a double entry requires a
|
||
|
character-by-character comparison to the original to meet the accuracy
|
||
|
requirement. LC is not accustomed to publish imperfect texts, which
|
||
|
makes attempting to deal with the industry standard an emotionally
|
||
|
fraught issue for AM. As was mentioned in the previous day's discussion,
|
||
|
going from 99.95 to 99.99 percent accuracy usually doubles costs and
|
||
|
means a third keying or another complete run-through of the text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Although AM has learned much from its experiences with various collections
|
||
|
and various service bureaus, ERWAY concluded pessimistically that no
|
||
|
breakthrough has been achieved. Incremental improvements have occurred
|
||
|
in some of the OCR technology, some of the processes, and some of the
|
||
|
standards acceptances, which, though they may lead to somewhat lower costs,
|
||
|
do not offer much encouragement to many people who are anxiously awaiting
|
||
|
the day that the entire contents of LC are available on-line.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
ZIDAR * Several answers to why one attempts to perform full-text
|
||
|
conversion * Per page cost of performing OCR * Typical problems
|
||
|
encountered during editing * Editing poor copy OCR vs. rekeying *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Judith ZIDAR, coordinator, National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program
|
||
|
(NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL), offered several answers to
|
||
|
the question of why one attempts to perform full-text conversion: 1)
|
||
|
Text in an image can be read by a human but not by a computer, so of
|
||
|
course it is not searchable and there is not much one can do with it. 2)
|
||
|
Some material simply requires word-level access. For instance, the legal
|
||
|
profession insists on full-text access to its material; with taxonomic or
|
||
|
geographic material, which entails numerous names, one virtually requires
|
||
|
word-level access. 3) Full text permits rapid browsing and searching,
|
||
|
something that cannot be achieved in an image with today's technology.
|
||
|
4) Text stored as ASCII and delivered in ASCII is standardized and highly
|
||
|
portable. 5) People just want full-text searching, even those who do not
|
||
|
know how to do it. NAL, for the most part, is performing OCR at an
|
||
|
actual cost per average-size page of approximately $7. NAL scans the
|
||
|
page to create the electronic image and passes it through the OCR device.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR next rehearsed several typical problems encountered during editing.
|
||
|
Praising the celerity of her student workers, ZIDAR observed that editing
|
||
|
requires approximately five to ten minutes per page, assuming that there
|
||
|
are no large tables to audit. Confusion among the three characters I, 1,
|
||
|
and l, constitutes perhaps the most common problem encountered. Zeroes
|
||
|
and O's also are frequently confused. Double M's create a particular
|
||
|
problem, even on clean pages. They are so wide in most fonts that they
|
||
|
touch, and the system simply cannot tell where one letter ends and the
|
||
|
other begins. Complex page formats occasionally fail to columnate
|
||
|
properly, which entails rescanning as though one were working with a
|
||
|
single column, entering the ASCII, and decolumnating for better
|
||
|
searching. With proportionally spaced text, OCR can have difficulty
|
||
|
discerning what is a space and what are merely spaces between letters, as
|
||
|
opposed to spaces between words, and therefore will merge text or break
|
||
|
up words where it should not.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR said that it can often take longer to edit a poor-copy OCR than to
|
||
|
key it from scratch. NAL has also experimented with partial editing of
|
||
|
text, whereby project workers go into and clean up the format, removing
|
||
|
stray characters but not running a spell-check. NAL corrects typos in
|
||
|
the title and authors' names, which provides a foothold for searching and
|
||
|
browsing. Even extremely poor-quality OCR (e.g., 60-percent accuracy)
|
||
|
can still be searched, because numerous words are correct, while the
|
||
|
important words are probably repeated often enough that they are likely
|
||
|
to be found correct somewhere. Librarians, however, cannot tolerate this
|
||
|
situation, though end users seem more willing to use this text for
|
||
|
searching, provided that NAL indicates that it is unedited. ZIDAR
|
||
|
concluded that rekeying of text may be the best route to take, in spite
|
||
|
of numerous problems with quality control and cost.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Modifying an image before performing OCR * NAL's costs per
|
||
|
page *AM's costs per page and experience with Federal Prison Industries *
|
||
|
Elements comprising NATDP's costs per page * OCR and structured markup *
|
||
|
Distinction between the structure of a document and its representation
|
||
|
when put on the screen or printed *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOOTON prefaced the lengthy discussion that followed with several
|
||
|
comments about modifying an image before one reaches the point of
|
||
|
performing OCR. For example, in regard to an application containing a
|
||
|
significant amount of redundant data, such as form-type data, numerous
|
||
|
companies today are working on various kinds of form renewal, prior to
|
||
|
going through a recognition process, by using dropout colors. Thus,
|
||
|
acquiring access to form design or using electronic means are worth
|
||
|
considering. HOOTON also noted that conversion usually makes or breaks
|
||
|
one's imaging system. It is extremely important, extremely costly in
|
||
|
terms of either capital investment or service, and determines the quality
|
||
|
of the remainder of one's system, because it determines the character of
|
||
|
the raw material used by the system.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning the four projects undertaken by NAL, two inside and two
|
||
|
performed by outside contractors, ZIDAR revealed that an in-house service
|
||
|
bureau executed the first at a cost between $8 and $10 per page for
|
||
|
everything, including building of the database. The project undertaken
|
||
|
by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
|
||
|
cost approximately $10 per page for the conversion, plus some expenses
|
||
|
for the software and building of the database. The Acid Rain Project--a
|
||
|
two-disk set produced by the University of Vermont, consisting of
|
||
|
Canadian publications on acid rain--cost $6.70 per page for everything,
|
||
|
including keying of the text, which was double keyed, scanning of the
|
||
|
images, and building of the database. The in-house project offered
|
||
|
considerable ease of convenience and greater control of the process. On
|
||
|
the other hand, the service bureaus know their job and perform it
|
||
|
expeditiously, because they have more people.
|
||
|
|
||
|
As a useful comparison, ERWAY revealed AM's costs as follows: $0.75
|
||
|
cents to $0.85 cents per thousand characters, with an average page
|
||
|
containing 2,700 characters. Requirements for coding and imaging
|
||
|
increase the costs. Thus, conversion of the text, including the coding,
|
||
|
costs approximately $3 per page. (This figure does not include the
|
||
|
imaging and database-building included in the NAL costs.) AM also
|
||
|
enjoyed a happy experience with Federal Prison Industries, which
|
||
|
precluded the necessity of going through the request-for-proposal process
|
||
|
to award a contract, because it is another government agency. The
|
||
|
prisoners performed AM's rekeying just as well as other service bureaus
|
||
|
and proved handy as well. AM shipped them the books, which they would
|
||
|
photocopy on a book-edge scanner. They would perform the markup on
|
||
|
photocopies, return the books as soon as they were done with them,
|
||
|
perform the keying, and return the material to AM on WORM disks.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ZIDAR detailed the elements that constitute the previously noted cost of
|
||
|
approximately $7 per page. Most significant is the editing, correction
|
||
|
of errors, and spell-checkings, which though they may sound easy to
|
||
|
perform require, in fact, a great deal of time. Reformatting text also
|
||
|
takes a while, but a significant amount of NAL's expenses are for equipment,
|
||
|
which was extremely expensive when purchased because it was one of the few
|
||
|
systems on the market. The costs of equipment are being amortized over
|
||
|
five years but are still quite high, nearly $2,000 per month.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY raised a general question concerning OCR and the amount of editing
|
||
|
required (substantial in her experience) to generate the kind of
|
||
|
structured markup necessary for manipulating the text on the computer or
|
||
|
loading it into any retrieval system. She wondered if the speakers could
|
||
|
extend the previous question about the cost-benefit of adding or exerting
|
||
|
structured markup. ERWAY noted that several OCR systems retain italics,
|
||
|
bolding, and other spatial formatting. While the material may not be in
|
||
|
the format desired, these systems possess the ability to remove the
|
||
|
original materials quickly from the hands of the people performing the
|
||
|
conversion, as well as to retain that information so that users can work
|
||
|
with it. HOCKEY rejoined that the current thinking on markup is that one
|
||
|
should not say that something is italic or bold so much as why it is that
|
||
|
way. To be sure, one needs to know that something was italicized, but
|
||
|
how can one get from one to the other? One can map from the structure to
|
||
|
the typographic representation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER suggested that, given the 100 million items the Library
|
||
|
holds, it may not be possible for LC to do more than report that a thing
|
||
|
was in italics as opposed to why it was italics, although that may be
|
||
|
desirable in some contexts. Promising to talk a bit during the afternoon
|
||
|
session about several experiments OCLC performed on automatic recognition
|
||
|
of document elements, and which they hoped to extend, WEIBEL said that in
|
||
|
fact one can recognize the major elements of a document with a fairly
|
||
|
high degree of reliability, at least as good as OCR. STEVENS drew a
|
||
|
useful distinction between standard, generalized markup (i.e., defining
|
||
|
for a document-type definition the structure of the document), and what
|
||
|
he termed a style sheet, which had to do with italics, bolding, and other
|
||
|
forms of emphasis. Thus, two different components are at work, one being
|
||
|
the structure of the document itself (its logic), and the other being its
|
||
|
representation when it is put on the screen or printed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION V. APPROACHES TO PREPARING ELECTRONIC TEXTS
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
HOCKEY * Text in ASCII and the representation of electronic text versus
|
||
|
an image * The need to look at ways of using markup to assist retrieval *
|
||
|
The need for an encoding format that will be reusable and multifunctional
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan HOCKEY, director, Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
|
||
|
(CETH), Rutgers and Princeton Universities, announced that one talk
|
||
|
(WEIBEL's) was moved into this session from the morning and that David
|
||
|
Packard was unable to attend. The session would attempt to focus more on
|
||
|
what one can do with a text in ASCII and the representation of electronic
|
||
|
text rather than just an image, what one can do with a computer that
|
||
|
cannot be done with a book or an image. It would be argued that one can
|
||
|
do much more than just read a text, and from that starting point one can
|
||
|
use markup and methods of preparing the text to take full advantage of
|
||
|
the capability of the computer. That would lead to a discussion of what
|
||
|
the European Community calls REUSABILITY, what may better be termed
|
||
|
DURABILITY, that is, how to prepare or make a text that will last a long
|
||
|
time and that can be used for as many applications as possible, which
|
||
|
would lead to issues of improving intellectual access.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY urged the need to look at ways of using markup to facilitate retrieval,
|
||
|
not just for referencing or to help locate an item that is retrieved, but also to put markup tags in
|
||
|
a text to help retrieve the thing sought either with linguistic tagging or
|
||
|
interpretation. HOCKEY also argued that little advancement had occurred in
|
||
|
the software tools currently available for retrieving and searching text.
|
||
|
She pressed the desideratum of going beyond Boolean searches and performing
|
||
|
more sophisticated searching, which the insertion of more markup in the text
|
||
|
would facilitate. Thinking about electronic texts as opposed to images means
|
||
|
considering material that will never appear in print form, or print will not
|
||
|
be its primary form, that is, material which only appears in electronic form.
|
||
|
HOCKEY alluded to the history and the need for markup and tagging and
|
||
|
electronic text, which was developed through the use of computers in the
|
||
|
humanities; as MICHELSON had observed, Father Busa had started in 1949
|
||
|
to prepare the first-ever text on the computer.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY remarked several large projects, particularly in Europe, for the
|
||
|
compilation of dictionaries, language studies, and language analysis, in
|
||
|
which people have built up archives of text and have begun to recognize
|
||
|
the need for an encoding format that will be reusable and multifunctional,
|
||
|
that can be used not just to print the text, which may be assumed to be a
|
||
|
byproduct of what one wants to do, but to structure it inside the computer
|
||
|
so that it can be searched, built into a Hypertext system, etc.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
WEIBEL * OCLC's approach to preparing electronic text: retroconversion,
|
||
|
keying of texts, more automated ways of developing data * Project ADAPT
|
||
|
and the CORE Project * Intelligent character recognition does not exist *
|
||
|
Advantages of SGML * Data should be free of procedural markup;
|
||
|
descriptive markup strongly advocated * OCLC's interface illustrated *
|
||
|
Storage requirements and costs for putting a lot of information on line *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Stuart WEIBEL, senior research scientist, Online Computer Library Center,
|
||
|
Inc. (OCLC), described OCLC's approach to preparing electronic text. He
|
||
|
argued that the electronic world into which we are moving must
|
||
|
accommodate not only the future but the past as well, and to some degree
|
||
|
even the present. Thus, starting out at one end with retroconversion and
|
||
|
keying of texts, one would like to move toward much more automated ways
|
||
|
of developing data.
|
||
|
|
||
|
For example, Project ADAPT had to do with automatically converting
|
||
|
document images into a structured document database with OCR text as
|
||
|
indexing and also a little bit of automatic formatting and tagging of
|
||
|
that text. The CORE project hosted by Cornell University, Bellcore,
|
||
|
OCLC, the American Chemical Society, and Chemical Abstracts, constitutes
|
||
|
WEIBEL's principal concern at the moment. This project is an example of
|
||
|
converting text for which one already has a machine-readable version into
|
||
|
a format more suitable for electronic delivery and database searching.
|
||
|
(Since Michael LESK had previously described CORE, WEIBEL would say
|
||
|
little concerning it.) Borrowing a chemical phrase, de novo synthesis,
|
||
|
WEIBEL cited the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials as an example
|
||
|
of de novo electronic publishing, that is, a form in which the primary
|
||
|
form of the information is electronic.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Project ADAPT, then, which OCLC completed a couple of years ago and in
|
||
|
fact is about to resume, is a model in which one takes page images either
|
||
|
in paper or microfilm and converts them automatically to a searchable
|
||
|
electronic database, either on-line or local. The operating assumption
|
||
|
is that accepting some blemishes in the data, especially for
|
||
|
retroconversion of materials, will make it possible to accomplish more.
|
||
|
Not enough money is available to support perfect conversion.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WEIBEL related several steps taken to perform image preprocessing
|
||
|
(processing on the image before performing optical character
|
||
|
recognition), as well as image postprocessing. He denied the existence
|
||
|
of intelligent character recognition and asserted that what is wanted is
|
||
|
page recognition, which is a long way off. OCLC has experimented with
|
||
|
merging of multiple optical character recognition systems that will
|
||
|
reduce errors from an unacceptable rate of 5 characters out of every
|
||
|
l,000 to an unacceptable rate of 2 characters out of every l,000, but it
|
||
|
is not good enough. It will never be perfect.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concerning the CORE Project, WEIBEL observed that Bellcore is taking the
|
||
|
topography files, extracting the page images, and converting those
|
||
|
topography files to SGML markup. LESK hands that data off to OCLC, which
|
||
|
builds that data into a Newton database, the same system that underlies
|
||
|
the on-line system in virtually all of the reference products at OCLC.
|
||
|
The long-term goal is to make the systems interoperable so that not just
|
||
|
Bellcore's system and OCLC's system can access this data, but other
|
||
|
systems can as well, and the key to that is the Z39.50 common command
|
||
|
language and the full-text extension. Z39.50 is fine for MARC records,
|
||
|
but is not enough to do it for full text (that is, make full texts
|
||
|
interoperable).
|
||
|
|
||
|
WEIBEL next outlined the critical role of SGML for a variety of purposes,
|
||
|
for example, as noted by HOCKEY, in the world of extremely large
|
||
|
databases, using highly structured data to perform field searches.
|
||
|
WEIBEL argued that by building the structure of the data in (i.e., the
|
||
|
structure of the data originally on a printed page), it becomes easy to
|
||
|
look at a journal article even if one cannot read the characters and know
|
||
|
where the title or author is, or what the sections of that document would be.
|
||
|
OCLC wants to make that structure explicit in the database, because it will
|
||
|
be important for retrieval purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The second big advantage of SGML is that it gives one the ability to
|
||
|
build structure into the database that can be used for display purposes
|
||
|
without contaminating the data with instructions about how to format
|
||
|
things. The distinction lies between procedural markup, which tells one
|
||
|
where to put dots on the page, and descriptive markup, which describes
|
||
|
the elements of a document.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WEIBEL believes that there should be no procedural markup in the data at
|
||
|
all, that the data should be completely unsullied by information about
|
||
|
italics or boldness. That should be left up to the display device,
|
||
|
whether that display device is a page printer or a screen display device.
|
||
|
By keeping one's database free of that kind of contamination, one can
|
||
|
make decisions down the road, for example, reorganize the data in ways
|
||
|
that are not cramped by built-in notions of what should be italic and
|
||
|
what should be bold. WEIBEL strongly advocated descriptive markup. As
|
||
|
an example, he illustrated the index structure in the CORE data. With
|
||
|
subsequent illustrated examples of markup, WEIBEL acknowledged the common
|
||
|
complaint that SGML is hard to read in its native form, although markup
|
||
|
decreases considerably once one gets into the body. Without the markup,
|
||
|
however, one would not have the structure in the data. One can pass
|
||
|
markup through a LaTeX processor and convert it relatively easily to a
|
||
|
printed version of the document.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WEIBEL next illustrated an extremely cluttered screen dump of OCLC's
|
||
|
system, in order to show as much as possible the inherent capability on
|
||
|
the screen. (He noted parenthetically that he had become a supporter of
|
||
|
X-Windows as a result of the progress of the CORE Project.) WEIBEL also
|
||
|
illustrated the two major parts of the interface: l) a control box that
|
||
|
allows one to generate lists of items, which resembles a small table of
|
||
|
contents based on key words one wishes to search, and 2) a document
|
||
|
viewer, which is a separate process in and of itself. He demonstrated
|
||
|
how to follow links through the electronic database simply by selecting
|
||
|
the appropriate button and bringing them up. He also noted problems that
|
||
|
remain to be accommodated in the interface (e.g., as pointed out by LESK,
|
||
|
what happens when users do not click on the icon for the figure).
|
||
|
|
||
|
Given the constraints of time, WEIBEL omitted a large number of ancillary
|
||
|
items in order to say a few words concerning storage requirements and
|
||
|
what will be required to put a lot of things on line. Since it is
|
||
|
extremely expensive to reconvert all of this data, especially if it is
|
||
|
just in paper form (and even if it is in electronic form in typesetting
|
||
|
tapes), he advocated building journals electronically from the start. In
|
||
|
that case, if one only has text graphics and indexing (which is all that
|
||
|
one needs with de novo electronic publishing, because there is no need to
|
||
|
go back and look at bit-maps of pages), one can get 10,000 journals of
|
||
|
full text, or almost 6 million pages per year. These pages can be put in
|
||
|
approximately 135 gigabytes of storage, which is not all that much,
|
||
|
WEIBEL said. For twenty years, something less than three terabytes would
|
||
|
be required. WEIBEL calculated the costs of storing this information as
|
||
|
follows: If a gigabyte costs approximately $1,000, then a terabyte costs
|
||
|
approximately $1 million to buy in terms of hardware. One also needs a
|
||
|
building to put it in and a staff like OCLC to handle that information.
|
||
|
So, to support a terabyte, multiply by five, which gives $5 million per
|
||
|
year for a supported terabyte of data.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Tapes saved by ACS are the typography files originally
|
||
|
supporting publication of the journal * Cost of building tagged text into
|
||
|
the database *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the question-and-answer period that followed WEIBEL's
|
||
|
presentation, these clarifications emerged. The tapes saved by the
|
||
|
American Chemical Society are the typography files that originally
|
||
|
supported the publication of the journal. Although they are not tagged
|
||
|
in SGML, they are tagged in very fine detail. Every single sentence is
|
||
|
marked, all the registry numbers, all the publications issues, dates, and
|
||
|
volumes. No cost figures on tagging material on a per-megabyte basis
|
||
|
were available. Because ACS's typesetting system runs from tagged text,
|
||
|
there is no extra cost per article. It was unknown what it costs ACS to
|
||
|
keyboard the tagged text rather than just keyboard the text in the
|
||
|
cheapest process. In other words, since one intends to publish things
|
||
|
and will need to build tagged text into a typography system in any case,
|
||
|
if one does that in such a way that it can drive not only typography but
|
||
|
an electronic system (which is what ACS intends to do--move to SGML
|
||
|
publishing), the marginal cost is zero. The marginal cost represents the
|
||
|
cost of building tagged text into the database, which is small.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN * Distinction between texts and computers * Implications
|
||
|
of recognizing that all representation is encoding * Dealing with
|
||
|
complicated representations of text entails the need for a grammar of
|
||
|
documents * Variety of forms of formal grammars * Text as a bit-mapped
|
||
|
image does not represent a serious attempt to represent text in
|
||
|
electronic form * SGML, the TEI, document-type declarations, and the
|
||
|
reusability and longevity of data * TEI conformance explicitly allows
|
||
|
extension or modification of the TEI tag set * Administrative background
|
||
|
of the TEI * Several design goals for the TEI tag set * An absolutely
|
||
|
fixed requirement of the TEI Guidelines * Challenges the TEI has
|
||
|
attempted to face * Good texts not beyond economic feasibility * The
|
||
|
issue of reproducibility or processability * The issue of mages as
|
||
|
simulacra for the text redux * One's model of text determines what one's
|
||
|
software can do with a text and has economic consequences *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Prior to speaking about SGML and markup, Michael SPERBERG-McQUEEN, editor,
|
||
|
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), University of Illinois-Chicago, first drew
|
||
|
a distinction between texts and computers: Texts are abstract cultural
|
||
|
and linguistic objects while computers are complicated physical devices,
|
||
|
he said. Abstract objects cannot be placed inside physical devices; with
|
||
|
computers one can only represent text and act upon those representations.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The recognition that all representation is encoding, SPERBERG-McQUEEN
|
||
|
argued, leads to the recognition of two things: 1) The topic description
|
||
|
for this session is slightly misleading, because there can be no discussion
|
||
|
of pros and cons of text-coding unless what one means is pros and cons of
|
||
|
working with text with computers. 2) No text can be represented in a
|
||
|
computer without some sort of encoding; images are one way of encoding text,
|
||
|
ASCII is another, SGML yet another. There is no encoding without some
|
||
|
information loss, that is, there is no perfect reproduction of a text that
|
||
|
allows one to do away with the original. Thus, the question becomes,
|
||
|
What is the most useful representation of text for a serious work?
|
||
|
This depends on what kind of serious work one is talking about.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The projects demonstrated the previous day all involved highly complex
|
||
|
information and fairly complex manipulation of the textual material.
|
||
|
In order to use that complicated information, one has to calculate it
|
||
|
slowly or manually and store the result. It needs to be stored, therefore,
|
||
|
as part of one's representation of the text. Thus, one needs to store the
|
||
|
structure in the text. To deal with complicated representations of text,
|
||
|
one needs somehow to control the complexity of the representation of a text;
|
||
|
that means one needs a way of finding out whether a document and an
|
||
|
electronic representation of a document is legal or not; and that
|
||
|
means one needs a grammar of documents.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN discussed the variety of forms of formal grammars,
|
||
|
implicit and explicit, as applied to text, and their capabilities. He
|
||
|
argued that these grammars correspond to different models of text that
|
||
|
different developers have. For example, one implicit model of the text
|
||
|
is that there is no internal structure, but just one thing after another,
|
||
|
a few characters and then perhaps a start-title command, and then a few
|
||
|
more characters and an end-title command. SPERBERG-McQUEEN also
|
||
|
distinguished several kinds of text that have a sort of hierarchical
|
||
|
structure that is not very well defined, which, typically, corresponds
|
||
|
to grammars that are not very well defined, as well as hierarchies that
|
||
|
are very well defined (e.g., the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and extremely
|
||
|
complicated things such as SGML, which handle strictly hierarchical data
|
||
|
very nicely.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN conceded that one other model not illustrated on his two
|
||
|
displays was the model of text as a bit-mapped image, an image of a page,
|
||
|
and confessed to having been converted to a limited extent by the
|
||
|
Workshop to the view that electronic images constitute a promising,
|
||
|
probably superior alternative to microfilming. But he was not convinced
|
||
|
that electronic images represent a serious attempt to represent text in
|
||
|
electronic form. Many of their problems stem from the fact that they are
|
||
|
not direct attempts to represent the text but attempts to represent the
|
||
|
page, thus making them representations of representations.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In this situation of increasingly complicated textual information and the
|
||
|
need to control that complexity in a useful way (which begs the question
|
||
|
of the need for good textual grammars), one has the introduction of SGML.
|
||
|
With SGML, one can develop specific document-type declarations
|
||
|
for specific text types or, as with the TEI, attempts to generate
|
||
|
general document-type declarations that can handle all sorts of text.
|
||
|
The TEI is an attempt to develop formats for text representation that
|
||
|
will ensure the kind of reusability and longevity of data discussed earlier.
|
||
|
It offers a way to stay alive in the state of permanent technological
|
||
|
revolution.
|
||
|
|
||
|
It has been a continuing challenge in the TEI to create document grammars
|
||
|
that do some work in controlling the complexity of the textual object but
|
||
|
also allowing one to represent the real text that one will find.
|
||
|
Fundamental to the notion of the TEI is that TEI conformance allows one
|
||
|
the ability to extend or modify the TEI tag set so that it fits the text
|
||
|
that one is attempting to represent.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN next outlined the administrative background of the TEI.
|
||
|
The TEI is an international project to develop and disseminate guidelines
|
||
|
for the encoding and interchange of machine-readable text. It is
|
||
|
sponsored by the Association for Computers in the Humanities, the
|
||
|
Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Association for
|
||
|
Literary and Linguistic Computing. Representatives of numerous other
|
||
|
professional societies sit on its advisory board. The TEI has a number
|
||
|
of affiliated projects that have provided assistance by testing drafts of
|
||
|
the guidelines.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Among the design goals for the TEI tag set, the scheme first of all must
|
||
|
meet the needs of research, because the TEI came out of the research
|
||
|
community, which did not feel adequately served by existing tag sets.
|
||
|
The tag set must be extensive as well as compatible with existing and
|
||
|
emerging standards. In 1990, version 1.0 of the Guidelines was released
|
||
|
(SPERBERG-McQUEEN illustrated their contents).
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN noted that one problem besetting electronic text has
|
||
|
been the lack of adequate internal or external documentation for many
|
||
|
existing electronic texts. The TEI guidelines as currently formulated
|
||
|
contain few fixed requirements, but one of them is this: There must
|
||
|
always be a document header, an in-file SGML tag that provides
|
||
|
1) a bibliographic description of the electronic object one is talking
|
||
|
about (that is, who included it, when, what for, and under which title);
|
||
|
and 2) the copy text from which it was derived, if any. If there was
|
||
|
no copy text or if the copy text is unknown, then one states as much.
|
||
|
Version 2.0 of the Guidelines was scheduled to be completed in fall 1992
|
||
|
and a revised third version is to be presented to the TEI advisory board
|
||
|
for its endorsement this coming winter. The TEI itself exists to provide
|
||
|
a markup language, not a marked-up text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Among the challenges the TEI has attempted to face is the need for a
|
||
|
markup language that will work for existing projects, that is, handle the
|
||
|
level of markup that people are using now to tag only chapter, section,
|
||
|
and paragraph divisions and not much else. At the same time, such a
|
||
|
language also will be able to scale up gracefully to handle the highly
|
||
|
detailed markup which many people foresee as the future destination of
|
||
|
much electronic text, and which is not the future destination but the
|
||
|
present home of numerous electronic texts in specialized areas.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN dismissed the lowest-common-denominator approach as
|
||
|
unable to support the kind of applications that draw people who have
|
||
|
never been in the public library regularly before, and make them come
|
||
|
back. He advocated more interesting text and more intelligent text.
|
||
|
Asserting that it is not beyond economic feasibility to have good texts,
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN noted that the TEI Guidelines listing 200-odd tags
|
||
|
contains tags that one is expected to enter every time the relevant
|
||
|
textual feature occurs. It contains all the tags that people need now,
|
||
|
and it is not expected that everyone will tag things in the same way.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The question of how people will tag the text is in large part a function
|
||
|
of their reaction to what SPERBERG-McQUEEN termed the issue of
|
||
|
reproducibility. What one needs to be able to reproduce are the things
|
||
|
one wants to work with. Perhaps a more useful concept than that of
|
||
|
reproducibility or recoverability is that of processability, that is,
|
||
|
what can one get from an electronic text without reading it again
|
||
|
in the original. He illustrated this contention with a page from
|
||
|
Jan Comenius's bilingual Introduction to Latin.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN returned at length to the issue of images as simulacra
|
||
|
for the text, in order to reiterate his belief that in the long run more
|
||
|
than images of pages of particular editions of the text are needed,
|
||
|
because just as second-generation photocopies and second-generation
|
||
|
microfilm degenerate, so second-generation representations tend to
|
||
|
degenerate, and one tends to overstress some relatively trivial aspects
|
||
|
of the text such as its layout on the page, which is not always
|
||
|
significant, despite what the text critics might say, and slight other
|
||
|
pieces of information such as the very important lexical ties between the
|
||
|
English and Latin versions of Comenius's bilingual text, for example.
|
||
|
Moreover, in many crucial respects it is easy to fool oneself concerning
|
||
|
what a scanned image of the text will accomplish. For example, in order
|
||
|
to study the transmission of texts, information concerning the text
|
||
|
carrier is necessary, which scanned images simply do not always handle.
|
||
|
Further, even the high-quality materials being produced at Cornell use
|
||
|
much of the information that one would need if studying those books as
|
||
|
physical objects. It is a choice that has been made. It is an arguably
|
||
|
justifiable choice, but one does not know what color those pen strokes in
|
||
|
the margin are or whether there was a stain on the page, because it has
|
||
|
been filtered out. One does not know whether there were rips in the page
|
||
|
because they do not show up, and on a couple of the marginal marks one
|
||
|
loses half of the mark because the pen is very light and the scanner
|
||
|
failed to pick it up, and so what is clearly a checkmark in the margin of
|
||
|
the original becomes a little scoop in the margin of the facsimile.
|
||
|
Standard problems for facsimile editions, not new to electronics, but
|
||
|
also true of light-lens photography, and are remarked here because it is
|
||
|
important that we not fool ourselves that even if we produce a very nice
|
||
|
image of this page with good contrast, we are not replacing the
|
||
|
manuscript any more than microfilm has replaced the manuscript.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The TEI comes from the research community, where its first allegiance
|
||
|
lies, but it is not just an academic exercise. It has relevance far
|
||
|
beyond those who spend all of their time studying text, because one's
|
||
|
model of text determines what one's software can do with a text. Good
|
||
|
models lead to good software. Bad models lead to bad software. That has
|
||
|
economic consequences, and it is these economic consequences that have
|
||
|
led the European Community to help support the TEI, and that will lead,
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN hoped, some software vendors to realize that if they
|
||
|
provide software with a better model of the text they can make a killing.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Implications of different DTDs and tag sets * ODA versus SGML *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the discussion that followed, several additional points were made.
|
||
|
Neither AAP (i.e., Association of American Publishers) nor CALS (i.e.,
|
||
|
Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistics Support) has a document-type
|
||
|
definition for ancient Greek drama, although the TEI will be able to
|
||
|
handle that. Given this state of affairs and assuming that the
|
||
|
technical-journal producers and the commercial vendors decide to use the
|
||
|
other two types, then an institution like the Library of Congress, which
|
||
|
might receive all of their publications, would have to be able to handle
|
||
|
three different types of document definitions and tag sets and be able to
|
||
|
distinguish among them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Office Document Architecture (ODA) has some advantages that flow from its
|
||
|
tight focus on office documents and clear directions for implementation.
|
||
|
Much of the ODA standard is easier to read and clearer at first reading
|
||
|
than the SGML standard, which is extremely general. What that means is
|
||
|
that if one wants to use graphics in TIFF and ODA, one is stuck, because
|
||
|
ODA defines graphics formats while TIFF does not, whereas SGML says the
|
||
|
world is not waiting for this work group to create another graphics format.
|
||
|
What is needed is an ability to use whatever graphics format one wants.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The TEI provides a socket that allows one to connect the SGML document to
|
||
|
the graphics. The notation that the graphics are in is clearly a choice
|
||
|
that one needs to make based on her or his environment, and that is one
|
||
|
advantage. SGML is less megalomaniacal in attempting to define formats
|
||
|
for all kinds of information, though more megalomaniacal in attempting to
|
||
|
cover all sorts of documents. The other advantage is that the model of
|
||
|
text represented by SGML is simply an order of magnitude richer and more
|
||
|
flexible than the model of text offered by ODA. Both offer hierarchical
|
||
|
structures, but SGML recognizes that the hierarchical model of the text
|
||
|
that one is looking at may not have been in the minds of the designers,
|
||
|
whereas ODA does not.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ODA is not really aiming for the kind of document that the TEI wants to
|
||
|
encompass. The TEI can handle the kind of material ODA has, as well as a
|
||
|
significantly broader range of material. ODA seems to be very much
|
||
|
focused on office documents, which is what it started out being called--
|
||
|
office document architecture.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
CALALUCA * Text-encoding from a publisher's perspective *
|
||
|
Responsibilities of a publisher * Reproduction of Migne's Latin series
|
||
|
whole and complete with SGML tags based on perceived need and expected
|
||
|
use * Particular decisions arising from the general decision to produce
|
||
|
and publish PLD *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
The final speaker in this session, Eric CALALUCA, vice president,
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., spoke from the perspective of a publisher re
|
||
|
text-encoding, rather than as one qualified to discuss methods of
|
||
|
encoding data, and observed that the presenters sitting in the room,
|
||
|
whether they had chosen to or not, were acting as publishers: making
|
||
|
choices, gathering data, gathering information, and making assessments.
|
||
|
CALALUCA offered the hard-won conviction that in publishing very large
|
||
|
text files (such as PLD), one cannot avoid making personal judgments of
|
||
|
appropriateness and structure.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In CALALUCA's view, encoding decisions stem from prior judgments. Two
|
||
|
notions have become axioms for him in the consideration of future sources
|
||
|
for electronic publication: 1) electronic text publishing is as personal
|
||
|
as any other kind of publishing, and questions of if and how to encode
|
||
|
the data are simply a consequence of that prior decision; 2) all
|
||
|
personal decisions are open to criticism, which is unavoidable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
CALALUCA rehearsed his role as a publisher or, better, as an intermediary
|
||
|
between what is viewed as a sound idea and the people who would make use
|
||
|
of it. Finding the specialist to advise in this process is the core of
|
||
|
that function. The publisher must monitor and hug the fine line between
|
||
|
giving users what they want and suggesting what they might need. One
|
||
|
responsibility of a publisher is to represent the desires of scholars and
|
||
|
research librarians as opposed to bullheadedly forcing them into areas
|
||
|
they would not choose to enter.
|
||
|
|
||
|
CALALUCA likened the questions being raised today about data structure
|
||
|
and standards to the decisions faced by the Abbe Migne himself during
|
||
|
production of the Patrologia series in the mid-nineteenth century.
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey's decision to reproduce Migne's Latin series whole and
|
||
|
complete with SGML tags was also based upon a perceived need and an
|
||
|
expected use. In the same way that Migne's work came to be far more than
|
||
|
a simple handbook for clerics, PLD is already far more than a database
|
||
|
for theologians. It is a bedrock source for the study of Western
|
||
|
civilization, CALALUCA asserted.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In regard to the decision to produce and publish PLD, the editorial board
|
||
|
offered direct judgments on the question of appropriateness of these
|
||
|
texts for conversion, their encoding and their distribution, and
|
||
|
concluded that the best possible project was one that avoided overt
|
||
|
intrusions or exclusions in so important a resource. Thus, the general
|
||
|
decision to transmit the original collection as clearly as possible with
|
||
|
the widest possible avenues for use led to other decisions: 1) To encode
|
||
|
the data or not, SGML or not, TEI or not. Again, the expected user
|
||
|
community asserted the need for normative tagging structures of important
|
||
|
humanities texts, and the TEI seemed the most appropriate structure for
|
||
|
that purpose. Research librarians, who are trained to view the larger
|
||
|
impact of electronic text sources on 80 or 90 or 100 doctoral
|
||
|
disciplines, loudly approved the decision to include tagging. They see
|
||
|
what is coming better than the specialist who is completely focused on
|
||
|
one edition of Ambrose's De Anima, and they also understand that the
|
||
|
potential uses exceed present expectations. 2) What will be tagged and
|
||
|
what will not. Once again, the board realized that one must tag the
|
||
|
obvious. But in no way should one attempt to identify through encoding
|
||
|
schemes every single discrete area of a text that might someday be
|
||
|
searched. That was another decision. Searching by a column number, an
|
||
|
author, a word, a volume, permitting combination searches, and tagging
|
||
|
notations seemed logical choices as core elements. 3) How does one make
|
||
|
the data available? Tieing it to a CD-ROM edition creates limitations,
|
||
|
but a magnetic tape file that is very large, is accompanied by the
|
||
|
encoding specifications, and that allows one to make local modifications
|
||
|
also allows one to incorporate any changes one may desire within the
|
||
|
bounds of private research, though exporting tag files from a CD-ROM
|
||
|
could serve just as well. Since no one on the board could possibly
|
||
|
anticipate each and every way in which a scholar might choose to mine
|
||
|
this data bank, it was decided to satisfy the basics and make some
|
||
|
provisions for what might come. 4) Not to encode the database would rob
|
||
|
it of the interchangeability and portability these important texts should
|
||
|
accommodate. For CALALUCA, the extensive options presented by full-text
|
||
|
searching require care in text selection and strongly support encoding of
|
||
|
data to facilitate the widest possible search strategies. Better
|
||
|
software can always be created, but summoning the resources, the people,
|
||
|
and the energy to reconvert the text is another matter.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PLD is being encoded, captured, and distributed, because to
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey and the board it offers the widest possible array of
|
||
|
future research applications that can be seen today. CALALUCA concluded
|
||
|
by urging the encoding of all important text sources in whatever way
|
||
|
seems most appropriate and durable at the time, without blanching at the
|
||
|
thought that one's work may require emendation in the future. (Thus,
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey produced a very large humanities text database before the
|
||
|
final release of the TEI Guidelines.)
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
DISCUSSION * Creating texts with markup advocated * Trends in encoding *
|
||
|
The TEI and the issue of interchangeability of standards * A
|
||
|
misconception concerning the TEI * Implications for an institution like
|
||
|
LC in the event that a multiplicity of DTDs develops * Producing images
|
||
|
as a first step towards possible conversion to full text through
|
||
|
character recognition * The AAP tag sets as a common starting point and
|
||
|
the need for caution *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY prefaced the discussion that followed with several comments in
|
||
|
favor of creating texts with markup and on trends in encoding. In the
|
||
|
future, when many more texts are available for on-line searching, real
|
||
|
problems in finding what is wanted will develop, if one is faced with
|
||
|
millions of words of data. It therefore becomes important to consider
|
||
|
putting markup in texts to help searchers home in on the actual things
|
||
|
they wish to retrieve. Various approaches to refining retrieval methods
|
||
|
toward this end include building on a computer version of a dictionary
|
||
|
and letting the computer look up words in it to obtain more information
|
||
|
about the semantic structure or semantic field of a word, its grammatical
|
||
|
structure, and syntactic structure.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY commented on the present keen interest in the encoding world
|
||
|
in creating: 1) machine-readable versions of dictionaries that can be
|
||
|
initially tagged in SGML, which gives a structure to the dictionary entry;
|
||
|
these entries can then be converted into a more rigid or otherwise
|
||
|
different database structure inside the computer, which can be treated as
|
||
|
a dynamic tool for searching mechanisms; 2) large bodies of text to study
|
||
|
the language. In order to incorporate more sophisticated mechanisms,
|
||
|
more about how words behave needs to be known, which can be learned in
|
||
|
part from information in dictionaries. However, the last ten years have
|
||
|
seen much interest in studying the structure of printed dictionaries
|
||
|
converted into computer-readable form. The information one derives about
|
||
|
many words from those is only partial, one or two definitions of the
|
||
|
common or the usual meaning of a word, and then numerous definitions of
|
||
|
unusual usages. If the computer is using a dictionary to help retrieve
|
||
|
words in a text, it needs much more information about the common usages,
|
||
|
because those are the ones that occur over and over again. Hence the
|
||
|
current interest in developing large bodies of text in computer-readable
|
||
|
form in order to study the language. Several projects are engaged in
|
||
|
compiling, for example, 100 million words. HOCKEY described one with
|
||
|
which she was associated briefly at Oxford University involving
|
||
|
compilation of 100 million words of British English: about 10 percent of
|
||
|
that will contain detailed linguistic tagging encoded in SGML; it will
|
||
|
have word class taggings, with words identified as nouns, verbs,
|
||
|
adjectives, or other parts of speech. This tagging can then be used by
|
||
|
programs which will begin to learn a bit more about the structure of the
|
||
|
language, and then, can go to tag more text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY said that the more that is tagged accurately, the more one can
|
||
|
refine the tagging process and thus the bigger body of text one can build
|
||
|
up with linguistic tagging incorporated into it. Hence, the more tagging
|
||
|
or annotation there is in the text, the more one may begin to learn about
|
||
|
language and the more it will help accomplish more intelligent OCR. She
|
||
|
recommended the development of software tools that will help one begin to
|
||
|
understand more about a text, which can then be applied to scanning
|
||
|
images of that text in that format and to using more intelligence to help
|
||
|
one interpret or understand the text.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY posited the need to think about common methods of text-encoding
|
||
|
for a long time to come, because building these large bodies of text is
|
||
|
extremely expensive and will only be done once.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the more general discussion on approaches to encoding that followed,
|
||
|
these points were made:
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER identified the underlying problem with standards that all have to
|
||
|
struggle with in adopting a standard, namely, the tension between a very
|
||
|
highly defined standard that is very interchangeable but does not work
|
||
|
for everyone because something is lacking, and a standard that is less
|
||
|
defined, more open, more adaptable, but less interchangeable. Contending
|
||
|
that the way in which people use SGML is not sufficiently defined, BESSER
|
||
|
wondered 1) if people resist the TEI because they think it is too defined
|
||
|
in certain things they do not fit into, and 2) how progress with
|
||
|
interchangeability can be made without frightening people away.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN replied that the published drafts of the TEI had met
|
||
|
with surprisingly little objection on the grounds that they do not allow
|
||
|
one to handle X or Y or Z. Particular concerns of the affiliated
|
||
|
projects have led, in practice, to discussions of how extensions are to
|
||
|
be made; the primary concern of any project has to be how it can be
|
||
|
represented locally, thus making interchange secondary. The TEI has
|
||
|
received much criticism based on the notion that everything in it is
|
||
|
required or even recommended, which, as it happens, is a misconception
|
||
|
from the beginning, because none of it is required and very little is
|
||
|
actually actively recommended for all cases, except that one document
|
||
|
one's source.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN agreed with BESSER about this trade-off: all the
|
||
|
projects in a set of twenty TEI-conformant projects will not necessarily
|
||
|
tag the material in the same way. One result of the TEI will be that the
|
||
|
easiest problems will be solved--those dealing with the external form of
|
||
|
the information; but the problem that is hardest in interchange is that
|
||
|
one is not encoding what another wants, and vice versa. Thus, after
|
||
|
the adoption of a common notation, the differences in the underlying
|
||
|
conceptions of what is interesting about texts become more visible.
|
||
|
The success of a standard like the TEI will lie in the ability of
|
||
|
the recipient of interchanged texts to use some of what it contains
|
||
|
and to add the information that was not encoded that one wants, in a
|
||
|
layered way, so that texts can be gradually enriched and one does not
|
||
|
have to put in everything all at once. Hence, having a well-behaved
|
||
|
markup scheme is important.
|
||
|
|
||
|
STEVENS followed up on the paradoxical analogy that BESSER alluded to in
|
||
|
the example of the MARC records, namely, the formats that are the same
|
||
|
except that they are different. STEVENS drew a parallel between
|
||
|
document-type definitions and MARC records for books and serials and maps,
|
||
|
where one has a tagging structure and there is a text-interchange.
|
||
|
STEVENS opined that the producers of the information will set the terms
|
||
|
for the standard (i.e., develop document-type definitions for the users
|
||
|
of their products), creating a situation that will be problematical for
|
||
|
an institution like the Library of Congress, which will have to deal with
|
||
|
the DTDs in the event that a multiplicity of them develops. Thus,
|
||
|
numerous people are seeking a standard but cannot find the tag set that
|
||
|
will be acceptable to them and their clients. SPERBERG-McQUEEN agreed
|
||
|
with this view, and said that the situation was in a way worse: attempting
|
||
|
to unify arbitrary DTDs resembled attempting to unify a MARC record with a
|
||
|
bibliographic record done according to the Prussian instructions.
|
||
|
According to STEVENS, this situation occurred very early in the process.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WATERS recalled from early discussions on Project Open Book the concern
|
||
|
of many people that merely by producing images, POB was not really
|
||
|
enhancing intellectual access to the material. Nevertheless, not wishing
|
||
|
to overemphasize the opposition between imaging and full text, WATERS
|
||
|
stated that POB views getting the images as a first step toward possibly
|
||
|
converting to full text through character recognition, if the technology
|
||
|
is appropriate. WATERS also emphasized that encoding is involved even
|
||
|
with a set of images.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN agreed with WATERS that one can create an SGML document
|
||
|
consisting wholly of images. At first sight, organizing graphic images
|
||
|
with an SGML document may not seem to offer great advantages, but the
|
||
|
advantages of the scheme WATERS described would be precisely that
|
||
|
ability to move into something that is more of a multimedia document:
|
||
|
a combination of transcribed text and page images. WEIBEL concurred in
|
||
|
this judgment, offering evidence from Project ADAPT, where a page is
|
||
|
divided into text elements and graphic elements, and in fact the text
|
||
|
elements are organized by columns and lines. These lines may be used as
|
||
|
the basis for distributing documents in a network environment. As one
|
||
|
develops software intelligent enough to recognize what those elements
|
||
|
are, it makes sense to apply SGML to an image initially, that may, in
|
||
|
fact, ultimately become more and more text, either through OCR or edited
|
||
|
OCR or even just through keying. For WATERS, the labor of composing the
|
||
|
document and saying this set of documents or this set of images belongs
|
||
|
to this document constitutes a significant investment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
WEIBEL also made the point that the AAP tag sets, while not excessively
|
||
|
prescriptive, offer a common starting point; they do not define the
|
||
|
structure of the documents, though. They have some recommendations about
|
||
|
DTDs one could use as examples, but they do just suggest tag sets. For
|
||
|
example, the CORE project attempts to use the AAP markup as much as
|
||
|
possible, but there are clearly areas where structure must be added.
|
||
|
That in no way contradicts the use of AAP tag sets.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SPERBERG-McQUEEN noted that the TEI prepared a long working paper early
|
||
|
on about the AAP tag set and what it lacked that the TEI thought it
|
||
|
needed, and a fairly long critique of the naming conventions, which has
|
||
|
led to a very different style of naming in the TEI. He stressed the
|
||
|
importance of the opposition between prescriptive markup, the kind that a
|
||
|
publisher or anybody can do when producing documents de novo, and
|
||
|
descriptive markup, in which one has to take what the text carrier
|
||
|
provides. In these particular tag sets it is easy to overemphasize this
|
||
|
opposition, because the AAP tag set is extremely flexible. Even if one
|
||
|
just used the DTDs, they allow almost anything to appear almost anywhere.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION VI. COPYRIGHT ISSUES
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
PETERS * Several cautions concerning copyright in an electronic
|
||
|
environment * Review of copyright law in the United States * The notion
|
||
|
of the public good and the desirability of incentives to promote it *
|
||
|
What copyright protects * Works not protected by copyright * The rights
|
||
|
of copyright holders * Publishers' concerns in today's electronic
|
||
|
environment * Compulsory licenses * The price of copyright in a digital
|
||
|
medium and the need for cooperation * Additional clarifications * Rough
|
||
|
justice oftentimes the outcome in numerous copyright matters * Copyright
|
||
|
in an electronic society * Copyright law always only sets up the
|
||
|
boundaries; anything can be changed by contract *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
Marybeth PETERS, policy planning adviser to the Register of Copyrights,
|
||
|
Library of Congress, made several general comments and then opened the
|
||
|
floor to discussion of subjects of interest to the audience.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Having attended several sessions in an effort to gain a sense of what
|
||
|
people did and where copyright would affect their lives, PETERS expressed
|
||
|
the following cautions:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* If one takes and converts materials and puts them in new forms,
|
||
|
then, from a copyright point of view, one is creating something and
|
||
|
will receive some rights.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* However, if what one is converting already exists, a question
|
||
|
immediately arises about the status of the materials in question.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Putting something in the public domain in the United States offers
|
||
|
some freedom from anxiety, but distributing it throughout the world
|
||
|
on a network is another matter, even if one has put it in the public
|
||
|
domain in the United States. Re foreign laws, very frequently a
|
||
|
work can be in the public domain in the United States but protected
|
||
|
in other countries. Thus, one must consider all of the places a
|
||
|
work may reach, lest one unwittingly become liable to being faced
|
||
|
with a suit for copyright infringement, or at least a letter
|
||
|
demanding discussion of what one is doing.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PETERS reviewed copyright law in the United States. The U.S.
|
||
|
Constitution effectively states that Congress has the power to enact
|
||
|
copyright laws for two purposes: 1) to encourage the creation and
|
||
|
dissemination of intellectual works for the good of society as a whole;
|
||
|
and, significantly, 2) to give creators and those who package and
|
||
|
disseminate materials the economic rewards that are due them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Congress strives to strike a balance, which at times can become an
|
||
|
emotional issue. The United States has never accepted the notion of the
|
||
|
natural right of an author so much as it has accepted the notion of the
|
||
|
public good and the desirability of incentives to promote it. This state
|
||
|
of affairs, however, has created strains on the international level and
|
||
|
is the reason for several of the differences in the laws that we have.
|
||
|
Today the United States protects almost every kind of work that can be
|
||
|
called an expression of an author. The standard for gaining copyright
|
||
|
protection is simply originality. This is a low standard and means that
|
||
|
a work is not copied from something else, as well as shows a certain
|
||
|
minimal amount of authorship. One can also acquire copyright protection
|
||
|
for making a new version of preexisting material, provided it manifests
|
||
|
some spark of creativity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
However, copyright does not protect ideas, methods, systems--only the way
|
||
|
that one expresses those things. Nor does copyright protect anything
|
||
|
that is mechanical, anything that does not involve choice, or criteria
|
||
|
concerning whether or not one should do a thing. For example, the
|
||
|
results of a process called declicking, in which one mechanically removes
|
||
|
impure sounds from old recordings, are not copyrightable. On the other
|
||
|
hand, the choice to record a song digitally and to increase the sound of
|
||
|
violins or to bring up the tympani constitutes the results of conversion
|
||
|
that are copyrightable. Moreover, if a work is protected by copyright in
|
||
|
the United States, one generally needs the permission of the copyright
|
||
|
owner to convert it. Normally, who will own the new--that is, converted-
|
||
|
-material is a matter of contract. In the absence of a contract, the
|
||
|
person who creates the new material is the author and owner. But people
|
||
|
do not generally think about the copyright implications until after the
|
||
|
fact. PETERS stressed the need when dealing with copyrighted works to
|
||
|
think about copyright in advance. One's bargaining power is much greater
|
||
|
up front than it is down the road.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PETERS next discussed works not protected by copyright, for example, any
|
||
|
work done by a federal employee as part of his or her official duties is
|
||
|
in the public domain in the United States. The issue is not wholly free
|
||
|
of doubt concerning whether or not the work is in the public domain
|
||
|
outside the United States. Other materials in the public domain include:
|
||
|
any works published more than seventy-five years ago, and any work
|
||
|
published in the United States more than twenty-eight years ago, whose
|
||
|
copyright was not renewed. In talking about the new technology and
|
||
|
putting material in a digital form to send all over the world, PETERS
|
||
|
cautioned, one must keep in mind that while the rights may not be an
|
||
|
issue in the United States, they may be in different parts of the world,
|
||
|
where most countries previously employed a copyright term of the life of
|
||
|
the author plus fifty years.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PETERS next reviewed the economics of copyright holding. Simply,
|
||
|
economic rights are the rights to control the reproduction of a work in
|
||
|
any form. They belong to the author, or in the case of a work made for
|
||
|
hire, the employer. The second right, which is critical to conversion,
|
||
|
is the right to change a work. The right to make new versions is perhaps
|
||
|
one of the most significant rights of authors, particularly in an
|
||
|
electronic world. The third right is the right to publish the work and
|
||
|
the right to disseminate it, something that everyone who deals in an
|
||
|
electronic medium needs to know. The basic rule is if a copy is sold,
|
||
|
all rights of distribution are extinguished with the sale of that copy.
|
||
|
The key is that it must be sold. A number of companies overcome this
|
||
|
obstacle by leasing or renting their product. These companies argue that
|
||
|
if the material is rented or leased and not sold, they control the uses
|
||
|
of a work. The fourth right, and one very important in a digital world,
|
||
|
is a right of public performance, which means the right to show the work
|
||
|
sequentially. For example, copyright owners control the showing of a
|
||
|
CD-ROM product in a public place such as a public library. The reverse
|
||
|
side of public performance is something called the right of public
|
||
|
display. Moral rights also exist, which at the federal level apply only
|
||
|
to very limited visual works of art, but in theory may apply under
|
||
|
contract and other principles. Moral rights may include the right of an
|
||
|
author to have his or her name on a work, the right of attribution, and
|
||
|
the right to object to distortion or mutilation--the right of integrity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The way copyright law is worded gives much latitude to activities such as
|
||
|
preservation; to use of material for scholarly and research purposes when
|
||
|
the user does not make multiple copies; and to the generation of
|
||
|
facsimile copies of unpublished works by libraries for themselves and
|
||
|
other libraries. But the law does not allow anyone to become the
|
||
|
distributor of the product for the entire world. In today's electronic
|
||
|
environment, publishers are extremely concerned that the entire world is
|
||
|
networked and can obtain the information desired from a single copy in a
|
||
|
single library. Hence, if there is to be only one sale, which publishers
|
||
|
may choose to live with, they will obtain their money in other ways, for
|
||
|
example, from access and use. Hence, the development of site licenses
|
||
|
and other kinds of agreements to cover what publishers believe they
|
||
|
should be compensated for. Any solution that the United States takes
|
||
|
today has to consider the international arena.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Noting that the United States is a member of the Berne Convention and
|
||
|
subscribes to its provisions, PETERS described the permissions process.
|
||
|
She also defined compulsory licenses. A compulsory license, of which the
|
||
|
United States has had a few, builds into the law the right to use a work
|
||
|
subject to certain terms and conditions. In the international arena,
|
||
|
however, the ability to use compulsory licenses is extremely limited.
|
||
|
Thus, clearinghouses and other collectives comprise one option that has
|
||
|
succeeded in providing for use of a work. Often overlooked when one
|
||
|
begins to use copyrighted material and put products together is how
|
||
|
expensive the permissions process and managing it is. According to
|
||
|
PETERS, the price of copyright in a digital medium, whatever solution is
|
||
|
worked out, will include managing and assembling the database. She
|
||
|
strongly recommended that publishers and librarians or people with
|
||
|
various backgrounds cooperate to work out administratively feasible
|
||
|
systems, in order to produce better results.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the lengthy question-and-answer period that followed PETERS's
|
||
|
presentation, the following points emerged:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The Copyright Office maintains that anything mechanical and
|
||
|
totally exhaustive probably is not protected. In the event that
|
||
|
what an individual did in developing potentially copyrightable
|
||
|
material is not understood, the Copyright Office will ask about the
|
||
|
creative choices the applicant chose to make or not to make. As a
|
||
|
practical matter, if one believes she or he has made enough of those
|
||
|
choices, that person has a right to assert a copyright and someone
|
||
|
else must assert that the work is not copyrightable. The more
|
||
|
mechanical, the more automatic, a thing is, the less likely it is to
|
||
|
be copyrightable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Nearly all photographs are deemed to be copyrightable, but no one
|
||
|
worries about them much, because everyone is free to take the same
|
||
|
image. Thus, a photographic copyright represents what is called a
|
||
|
"thin" copyright. The photograph itself must be duplicated, in
|
||
|
order for copyright to be violated.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The Copyright Office takes the position that X-rays are not
|
||
|
copyrightable because they are mechanical. It can be argued
|
||
|
whether or not image enhancement in scanning can be protected. One
|
||
|
must exercise care with material created with public funds and
|
||
|
generally in the public domain. An article written by a federal
|
||
|
employee, if written as part of official duties, is not
|
||
|
copyrightable. However, control over a scientific article written
|
||
|
by a National Institutes of Health grantee (i.e., someone who
|
||
|
receives money from the U.S. government), depends on NIH policy. If
|
||
|
the government agency has no policy (and that policy can be
|
||
|
contained in its regulations, the contract, or the grant), the
|
||
|
author retains copyright. If a provision of the contract, grant, or
|
||
|
regulation states that there will be no copyright, then it does not
|
||
|
exist. When a work is created, copyright automatically comes into
|
||
|
existence unless something exists that says it does not.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* An enhanced electronic copy of a print copy of an older reference
|
||
|
work in the public domain that does not contain copyrightable new
|
||
|
material is a purely mechanical rendition of the original work, and
|
||
|
is not copyrightable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Usually, when a work enters the public domain, nothing can remove
|
||
|
it. For example, Congress recently passed into law the concept of
|
||
|
automatic renewal, which means that copyright on any work published
|
||
|
between l964 and l978 does not have to be renewed in order to
|
||
|
receive a seventy-five-year term. But any work not renewed before
|
||
|
1964 is in the public domain.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Concerning whether or not the United States keeps track of when
|
||
|
authors die, nothing was ever done, nor is anything being done at
|
||
|
the moment by the Copyright Office.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Software that drives a mechanical process is itself copyrightable.
|
||
|
If one changes platforms, the software itself has a copyright. The
|
||
|
World Intellectual Property Organization will hold a symposium 28
|
||
|
March through 2 April l993, at Harvard University, on digital
|
||
|
technology, and will study this entire issue. If one purchases a
|
||
|
computer software package, such as MacPaint, and creates something
|
||
|
new, one receives protection only for that which has been added.
|
||
|
|
||
|
PETERS added that often in copyright matters, rough justice is the
|
||
|
outcome, for example, in collective licensing, ASCAP (i.e., American
|
||
|
Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), and BMI (i.e., Broadcast
|
||
|
Music, Inc.), where it may seem that the big guys receive more than their
|
||
|
due. Of course, people ought not to copy a creative product without
|
||
|
paying for it; there should be some compensation. But the truth of the
|
||
|
world, and it is not a great truth, is that the big guy gets played on
|
||
|
the radio more frequently than the little guy, who has to do much more
|
||
|
until he becomes a big guy. That is true of every author, every
|
||
|
composer, everyone, and, unfortunately, is part of life.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Copyright always originates with the author, except in cases of works
|
||
|
made for hire. (Most software falls into this category.) When an author
|
||
|
sends his article to a journal, he has not relinquished copyright, though
|
||
|
he retains the right to relinquish it. The author receives absolutely
|
||
|
everything. The less prominent the author, the more leverage the
|
||
|
publisher will have in contract negotiations. In order to transfer the
|
||
|
rights, the author must sign an agreement giving them away.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In an electronic society, it is important to be able to license a writer
|
||
|
and work out deals. With regard to use of a work, it usually is much
|
||
|
easier when a publisher holds the rights. In an electronic era, a real
|
||
|
problem arises when one is digitizing and making information available.
|
||
|
PETERS referred again to electronic licensing clearinghouses. Copyright
|
||
|
ought to remain with the author, but as one moves forward globally in the
|
||
|
electronic arena, a middleman who can handle the various rights becomes
|
||
|
increasingly necessary.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The notion of copyright law is that it resides with the individual, but
|
||
|
in an on-line environment, where a work can be adapted and tinkered with
|
||
|
by many individuals, there is concern. If changes are authorized and
|
||
|
there is no agreement to the contrary, the person who changes a work owns
|
||
|
the changes. To put it another way, the person who acquires permission
|
||
|
to change a work technically will become the author and the owner, unless
|
||
|
some agreement to the contrary has been made. It is typical for the
|
||
|
original publisher to try to control all of the versions and all of the
|
||
|
uses. Copyright law always only sets up the boundaries. Anything can be
|
||
|
changed by contract.
|
||
|
|
||
|
******
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION VII. CONCLUSION
|
||
|
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
GENERAL DISCUSSION * Two questions for discussion * Different emphases in
|
||
|
the Workshop * Bringing the text and image partisans together *
|
||
|
Desiderata in planning the long-term development of something * Questions
|
||
|
surrounding the issue of electronic deposit * Discussion of electronic
|
||
|
deposit as an allusion to the issue of standards * Need for a directory
|
||
|
of preservation projects in digital form and for access to their
|
||
|
digitized files * CETH's catalogue of machine-readable texts in the
|
||
|
humanities * What constitutes a publication in the electronic world? *
|
||
|
Need for LC to deal with the concept of on-line publishing * LC's Network
|
||
|
Development Office exploring the limits of MARC as a standard in terms
|
||
|
of handling electronic information * Magnitude of the problem and the
|
||
|
need for distributed responsibility in order to maintain and store
|
||
|
electronic information * Workshop participants to be viewed as a starting
|
||
|
point * Development of a network version of AM urged * A step toward AM's
|
||
|
construction of some sort of apparatus for network access * A delicate
|
||
|
and agonizing policy question for LC * Re the issue of electronic
|
||
|
deposit, LC urged to initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed
|
||
|
responsibility * Suggestions for cooperative ventures * Commercial
|
||
|
publishers' fears * Strategic questions for getting the image and text
|
||
|
people to think through long-term cooperation * Clarification of the
|
||
|
driving force behind both the Perseus and the Cornell Xerox projects *
|
||
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
||
|
|
||
|
In his role as moderator of the concluding session, GIFFORD raised two
|
||
|
questions he believed would benefit from discussion: 1) Are there enough
|
||
|
commonalities among those of us that have been here for two days so that
|
||
|
we can see courses of action that should be taken in the future? And, if
|
||
|
so, what are they and who might take them? 2) Partly derivative from
|
||
|
that, but obviously very dangerous to LC as host, do you see a role for
|
||
|
the Library of Congress in all this? Of course, the Library of Congress
|
||
|
holds a rather special status in a number of these matters, because it is
|
||
|
not perceived as a player with an economic stake in them, but are there
|
||
|
roles that LC can play that can help advance us toward where we are heading?
|
||
|
|
||
|
Describing himself as an uninformed observer of the technicalities of the
|
||
|
last two days, GIFFORD detected three different emphases in the Workshop:
|
||
|
1) people who are very deeply committed to text; 2) people who are almost
|
||
|
passionate about images; and 3) a few people who are very committed to
|
||
|
what happens to the networks. In other words, the new networking
|
||
|
dimension, the accessibility of the processability, the portability of
|
||
|
all this across the networks. How do we pull those three together?
|
||
|
|
||
|
Adding a question that reflected HOCKEY's comment that this was the
|
||
|
fourth workshop she had attended in the previous thirty days, FLEISCHHAUER
|
||
|
wondered to what extent this meeting had reinvented the wheel, or if it
|
||
|
had contributed anything in the way of bringing together a different group
|
||
|
of people from those who normally appear on the workshop circuit.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY confessed to being struck at this meeting and the one the
|
||
|
Electronic Pierce Consortium organized the previous week that this was a
|
||
|
coming together of people working on texts and not images. Attempting to
|
||
|
bring the two together is something we ought to be thinking about for the
|
||
|
future: How one can think about working with image material to begin
|
||
|
with, but structuring it and digitizing it in such a way that at a later
|
||
|
stage it can be interpreted into text, and find a common way of building
|
||
|
text and images together so that they can be used jointly in the future,
|
||
|
with the network support to begin there because that is how people will
|
||
|
want to access it.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In planning the long-term development of something, which is what is
|
||
|
being done in electronic text, HOCKEY stressed the importance not only
|
||
|
of discussing the technical aspects of how one does it but particularly
|
||
|
of thinking about what the people who use the stuff will want to do.
|
||
|
But conversely, there are numerous things that people start to do with
|
||
|
electronic text or material that nobody ever thought of in the beginning.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LESK, in response to the question concerning the role of the Library of
|
||
|
Congress, remarked the often suggested desideratum of having electronic
|
||
|
deposit: Since everything is now computer-typeset, an entire decade of
|
||
|
material that was machine-readable exists, but the publishers frequently
|
||
|
did not save it; has LC taken any action to have its copyright deposit
|
||
|
operation start collecting these machine-readable versions? In the
|
||
|
absence of PETERS, GIFFORD replied that the question was being
|
||
|
actively considered but that that was only one dimension of the problem.
|
||
|
Another dimension is the whole question of the integrity of the original
|
||
|
electronic document. It becomes highly important in science to prove
|
||
|
authorship. How will that be done?
|
||
|
|
||
|
ERWAY explained that, under the old policy, to make a claim for a
|
||
|
copyright for works that were published in electronic form, including
|
||
|
software, one had to submit a paper copy of the first and last twenty
|
||
|
pages of code--something that represented the work but did not include
|
||
|
the entire work itself and had little value to anyone. As a temporary
|
||
|
measure, LC has claimed the right to demand electronic versions of
|
||
|
electronic publications. This measure entails a proactive role for the
|
||
|
Library to say that it wants a particular electronic version. Publishers
|
||
|
then have perhaps a year to submit it. But the real problem for LC is
|
||
|
what to do with all this material in all these different formats. Will
|
||
|
the Library mount it? How will it give people access to it? How does LC
|
||
|
keep track of the appropriate computers, software, and media? The situation
|
||
|
is so hard to control, ERWAY said, that it makes sense for each publishing
|
||
|
house to maintain its own archive. But LC cannot enforce that either.
|
||
|
|
||
|
GIFFORD acknowledged LESK's suggestion that establishing a priority
|
||
|
offered the solution, albeit a fairly complicated one. But who maintains
|
||
|
that register?, he asked. GRABER noted that LC does attempt to collect a
|
||
|
Macintosh version and the IBM-compatible version of software. It does
|
||
|
not collect other versions. But while true for software, BYRUM observed,
|
||
|
this reply does not speak to materials, that is, all the materials that
|
||
|
were published that were on somebody's microcomputer or driver tapes
|
||
|
at a publishing office across the country. LC does well to acquire
|
||
|
specific machine-readable products selectively that were intended to be
|
||
|
machine-readable. Materials that were in machine-readable form at one time,
|
||
|
BYRUM said, would be beyond LC's capability at the moment, insofar as
|
||
|
attempting to acquire, organize, and preserve them are concerned--and
|
||
|
preservation would be the most important consideration. In this
|
||
|
connection, GIFFORD reiterated the need to work out some sense of
|
||
|
distributive responsibility for a number of these issues, which
|
||
|
inevitably will require significant cooperation and discussion.
|
||
|
Nobody can do it all.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LESK suggested that some publishers may look with favor on LC beginning
|
||
|
to serve as a depository of tapes in an electronic manuscript standard.
|
||
|
Publishers may view this as a service that they did not have to perform
|
||
|
and they might send in tapes. However, SPERBERG-McQUEEN countered,
|
||
|
although publishers have had equivalent services available to them for a
|
||
|
long time, the electronic text archive has never turned away or been
|
||
|
flooded with tapes and is forever sending feedback to the depositor.
|
||
|
Some publishers do send in tapes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
ANDRE viewed this discussion as an allusion to the issue of standards.
|
||
|
She recommended that the AAP standard and the TEI, which has already been
|
||
|
somewhat harmonized internationally and which also shares several
|
||
|
compatibilities with the AAP, be harmonized to ensure sufficient
|
||
|
compatibility in the software. She drew the line at saying LC ought to
|
||
|
be the locus or forum for such harmonization.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Taking the group in a slightly different direction, but one where at
|
||
|
least in the near term LC might play a helpful role, LYNCH remarked the
|
||
|
plans of a number of projects to carry out preservation by creating
|
||
|
digital images that will end up in on-line or near-line storage at some
|
||
|
institution. Presumably, LC will link this material somehow to its
|
||
|
on-line catalog in most cases. Thus, it is in a digital form. LYNCH had
|
||
|
the impression that many of these institutions would be willing to make
|
||
|
those files accessible to other people outside the institution, provided
|
||
|
that there is no copyright problem. This desideratum will require
|
||
|
propagating the knowledge that those digitized files exist, so that they
|
||
|
can end up in other on-line catalogs. Although uncertain about the
|
||
|
mechanism for achieving this result, LYNCH said that it warranted
|
||
|
scrutiny because it seemed to be connected to some of the basic issues of
|
||
|
cataloging and distribution of records. It would be foolish, given the
|
||
|
amount of work that all of us have to do and our meager resources, to
|
||
|
discover multiple institutions digitizing the same work. Re microforms,
|
||
|
LYNCH said, we are in pretty good shape.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BATTIN called this a big problem and noted that the Cornell people (who
|
||
|
had already departed) were working on it. At issue from the beginning
|
||
|
was to learn how to catalog that information into RLIN and then into
|
||
|
OCLC, so that it would be accessible. That issue remains to be resolved.
|
||
|
LYNCH rejoined that putting it into OCLC or RLIN was helpful insofar as
|
||
|
somebody who is thinking of performing preservation activity on that work
|
||
|
could learn about it. It is not necessarily helpful for institutions to
|
||
|
make that available. BATTIN opined that the idea was that it not only be
|
||
|
for preservation purposes but for the convenience of people looking for
|
||
|
this material. She endorsed LYNCH's dictum that duplication of this
|
||
|
effort was to be avoided by every means.
|
||
|
|
||
|
HOCKEY informed the Workshop about one major current activity of CETH,
|
||
|
namely a catalogue of machine-readable texts in the humanities. Held on
|
||
|
RLIN at present, the catalogue has been concentrated on ASCII as opposed
|
||
|
to digitized images of text. She is exploring ways to improve the
|
||
|
catalogue and make it more widely available, and welcomed suggestions
|
||
|
about these concerns. CETH owns the records, which are not just
|
||
|
restricted to RLIN, and can distribute them however it wishes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Taking up LESK's earlier question, BATTIN inquired whether LC, since it
|
||
|
is accepting electronic files and designing a mechanism for dealing with
|
||
|
that rather than putting books on shelves, would become responsible for
|
||
|
the National Copyright Depository of Electronic Materials. Of course
|
||
|
that could not be accomplished overnight, but it would be something LC
|
||
|
could plan for. GIFFORD acknowledged that much thought was being devoted
|
||
|
to that set of problems and returned the discussion to the issue raised
|
||
|
by LYNCH--whether or not putting the kind of records that both BATTIN and
|
||
|
HOCKEY have been talking about in RLIN is not a satisfactory solution.
|
||
|
It seemed to him that RLIN answered LYNCH's original point concerning
|
||
|
some kind of directory for these kinds of materials. In a situation
|
||
|
where somebody is attempting to decide whether or not to scan this or
|
||
|
film that or to learn whether or not someone has already done so, LYNCH
|
||
|
suggested, RLIN is helpful, but it is not helpful in the case of a local,
|
||
|
on-line catalogue. Further, one would like to have her or his system be
|
||
|
aware that that exists in digital form, so that one can present it to a
|
||
|
patron, even though one did not digitize it, if it is out of copyright.
|
||
|
The only way to make those linkages would be to perform a tremendous
|
||
|
amount of real-time look-up, which would be awkward at best, or
|
||
|
periodically to yank the whole file from RLIN and match it against one's
|
||
|
own stuff, which is a nuisance.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But where, ERWAY inquired, does one stop including things that are
|
||
|
available with Internet, for instance, in one's local catalogue?
|
||
|
It almost seems that that is LC's means to acquire access to them.
|
||
|
That represents LC's new form of library loan. Perhaps LC's new on-line
|
||
|
catalogue is an amalgamation of all these catalogues on line. LYNCH
|
||
|
conceded that perhaps that was true in the very long term, but was not
|
||
|
applicable to scanning in the short term. In his view, the totals cited
|
||
|
by Yale, 10,000 books over perhaps a four-year period, and 1,000-1,500
|
||
|
books from Cornell, were not big numbers, while searching all over
|
||
|
creation for relatively rare occurrences will prove to be less efficient.
|
||
|
As GIFFORD wondered if this would not be a separable file on RLIN and
|
||
|
could be requested from them, BATTIN interjected that it was easily
|
||
|
accessible to an institution. SEVERTSON pointed out that that file, cum
|
||
|
enhancements, was available with reference information on CD-ROM, which
|
||
|
makes it a little more available.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In HOCKEY's view, the real question facing the Workshop is what to put in
|
||
|
this catalogue, because that raises the question of what constitutes a
|
||
|
publication in the electronic world. (WEIBEL interjected that Eric Joule
|
||
|
in OCLC's Office of Research is also wrestling with this particular
|
||
|
problem, while GIFFORD thought it sounded fairly generic.) HOCKEY
|
||
|
contended that a majority of texts in the humanities are in the hands
|
||
|
of either a small number of large research institutions or individuals
|
||
|
and are not generally available for anyone else to access at all.
|
||
|
She wondered if these texts ought to be catalogued.
|
||
|
|
||
|
After argument proceeded back and forth for several minutes over why
|
||
|
cataloguing might be a necessary service, LEBRON suggested that this
|
||
|
issue involved the responsibility of a publisher. The fact that someone
|
||
|
has created something electronically and keeps it under his or her
|
||
|
control does not constitute publication. Publication implies
|
||
|
dissemination. While it would be important for a scholar to let other
|
||
|
people know that this creation exists, in many respects this is no
|
||
|
different from an unpublished manuscript. That is what is being accessed
|
||
|
in there, except that now one is not looking at it in the hard-copy but
|
||
|
in the electronic environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
LEBRON expressed puzzlement at the variety of ways electronic publishing
|
||
|
has been viewed. Much of what has been discussed throughout these two
|
||
|
days has concerned CD-ROM publishing, whereas in the on-line environment
|
||
|
that she confronts, the constraints and challenges are very different.
|
||
|
Sooner or later LC will have to deal with the concept of on-line
|
||
|
publishing. Taking up the comment ERWAY made earlier about storing
|
||
|
copies, LEBRON gave her own journal as an example. How would she deposit
|
||
|
OJCCT for copyright?, she asked, because the journal will exist in the
|
||
|
mainframe at OCLC and people will be able to access it. Here the
|
||
|
situation is different, ownership versus access, and is something that
|
||
|
arises with publication in the on-line environment, faster than is
|
||
|
sometimes realized. Lacking clear answers to all of these questions
|
||
|
herself, LEBRON did not anticipate that LC would be able to take a role
|
||
|
in helping to define some of them for quite a while.
|
||
|
|
||
|
GREENFIELD observed that LC's Network Development Office is attempting,
|
||
|
among other things, to explore the limits of MARC as a standard in terms
|
||
|
of handling electronic information. GREENFIELD also noted that Rebecca
|
||
|
GUENTHER from that office gave a paper to the American Society for
|
||
|
Information Science (ASIS) summarizing several of the discussion papers
|
||
|
that were coming out of the Network Development Office. GREENFIELD said
|
||
|
he understood that that office had a list-server soliciting just the kind
|
||
|
of feedback received today concerning the difficulties of identifying and
|
||
|
cataloguing electronic information. GREENFIELD hoped that everybody
|
||
|
would be aware of that and somehow contribute to that conversation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Noting two of LC's roles, first, to act as a repository of record for
|
||
|
material that is copyrighted in this country, and second, to make
|
||
|
materials it holds available in some limited form to a clientele that
|
||
|
goes beyond Congress, BESSER suggested that it was incumbent on LC to
|
||
|
extend those responsibilities to all the things being published in
|
||
|
electronic form. This would mean eventually accepting electronic
|
||
|
formats. LC could require that at some point they be in a certain
|
||
|
limited set of formats, and then develop mechanisms for allowing people
|
||
|
to access those in the same way that other things are accessed. This
|
||
|
does not imply that they are on the network and available to everyone.
|
||
|
LC does that with most of its bibliographic records, BESSER said, which
|
||
|
end up migrating to the utility (e.g., OCLC) or somewhere else. But just
|
||
|
as most of LC's books are available in some form through interlibrary
|
||
|
loan or some other mechanism, so in the same way electronic formats ought
|
||
|
to be available to others in some format, though with some copyright
|
||
|
considerations. BESSER was not suggesting that these mechanisms be
|
||
|
established tomorrow, only that they seemed to fall within LC's purview,
|
||
|
and that there should be long-range plans to establish them.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Acknowledging that those from LC in the room agreed with BESSER
|
||
|
concerning the need to confront difficult questions, GIFFORD underscored
|
||
|
the magnitude of the problem of what to keep and what to select. GIFFORD
|
||
|
noted that LC currently receives some 31,000 items per day, not counting
|
||
|
electronic materials, and argued for much more distributed responsibility
|
||
|
in order to maintain and store electronic information.
|
||
|
|
||
|
BESSER responded that the assembled group could be viewed as a starting
|
||
|
point, whose initial operating premise could be helping to move in this
|
||
|
direction and defining how LC could do so, for example, in areas of
|
||
|
standardization or distribution of responsibility.
|
||
|
|
||
|
FLEISCHHAUER added that AM was fully engaged, wrestling with some of the
|
||
|
questions that pertain to the conversion of older historical materials,
|
||
|
which would be one thing that the Library of Congress might do. Several
|
||
|
points mentioned by BESSER and several others on this question have a
|
||
|
much greater impact on those who are concerned with cataloguing and the
|
||
|
networking of bibliographic information, as well as preservation itself.
|
||
|
|
||
|
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.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
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
|
||
|
|
||
|
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, Associate 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 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.
|
||
|
|
||
|
3. American Memory
|
||
|
Carl Fleischhauer, Coordinator, and
|
||
|
Ricky Erway, Associate Coordinator, Library of Congress
|
||
|
|
||
|
4. Founding Fathers example from Packard Humanities
|
||
|
Institute: The Papers of George Washington, 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 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-
|
||
|
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 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
|
||
|
|
||
|
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) 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 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, 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 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 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 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 analysis 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 manuscripts,
|
||
|
books, and pamphlets.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In 1991, the Library of Congress began a nationwide evaluation of AM in
|
||
|
different types of institutions. 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 institution, 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 Classical Greece
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Perseus Project (5) has just released Perseus 1.0, the first publicly
|
||
|
available version of its hypertextual database of multimedia materials on
|
||
|
classical 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 Classical 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 Classical 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 analyzer, 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
|
||
|
analyses 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
|
||
|
analyses 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:
|
||
|
|
||
|
1. Editorial selection (or exclusion) of materials in each
|
||
|
database
|
||
|
|
||
|
2. Deciding whether or not to incorporate a normative encoding
|
||
|
structure into the databases?
|
||
|
A. If one is selected, should it be SGML?
|
||
|
B. If SGML, then the TEI?
|
||
|
|
||
|
3. Deliver as CD-ROM, magnetic tape, or both?
|
||
|
|
||
|
4. Can one produce retrieval software advanced enough for the
|
||
|
postdoctoral linguist, yet accessible enough for unattended
|
||
|
general use? Should one try?
|
||
|
|
||
|
5. Re fair and liberal networking policies, what are the risks to
|
||
|
an electronic publisher?
|
||
|
|
||
|
6. How does the emergence of national and international education
|
||
|
networks affect the use and viability of research projects
|
||
|
requiring high investment? Do the new European Community
|
||
|
directives concerning database protection necessitate two
|
||
|
distinct publishing projects, one for North America and one for
|
||
|
overseas?
|
||
|
|
||
|
From new notions of "scholarly fair use" to the future of optical media,
|
||
|
virtually every issue related to electronic publishing was aired. The
|
||
|
result is two projects which have been constructed to provide the quality
|
||
|
research resources with the fewest encumbrances to use by teachers and
|
||
|
private scholars.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dorothy TWOHIG
|
||
|
|
||
|
In spring 1988 the editors of the papers of George Washington, John
|
||
|
Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin were
|
||
|
approached by classics scholar David Packard on behalf of the Packard
|
||
|
Humanities Foundation with a proposal to produce a CD-ROM edition of the
|
||
|
complete papers of each of the Founding Fathers. This electronic edition
|
||
|
will supplement the published volumes, making the documents widely
|
||
|
available to students and researchers at reasonable cost. We estimate
|
||
|
that our CD-ROM edition of Washington's Papers will be substantially
|
||
|
completed within the next two years and ready for publication. Within
|
||
|
the next ten years or so, similar CD-ROM editions of the Franklin, Adams,
|
||
|
Jefferson, and Madison papers also will be available. At the Library of
|
||
|
Congress's session on technology, I would like to discuss not only the
|
||
|
experience of the Washington Papers in producing the CD-ROM edition, but
|
||
|
the impact technology has had on these major editorial projects.
|
||
|
Already, we are editing our volumes with an eye to the material that will
|
||
|
be readily available in the CD-ROM edition. The completed electronic
|
||
|
edition will provide immense possibilities for the searching of documents
|
||
|
for information in a way never possible before. The kind of technical
|
||
|
innovations that are currently available and on the drawing board will
|
||
|
soon revolutionize historical research and the production of historical
|
||
|
documents. Unfortunately, much of this new technology is not being used
|
||
|
in the planning stages of historical projects, simply because many
|
||
|
historians are aware only in the vaguest way of its existence. At least
|
||
|
two major new historical editing projects are considering microfilm
|
||
|
editions, simply because they are not aware of the possibilities of
|
||
|
electronic alternatives and the advantages of the new technology in terms
|
||
|
of flexibility and research potential compared to microfilm. In fact,
|
||
|
too many of us in history and literature are still at the stage of
|
||
|
struggling with our PCs. There are many historical editorial projects in
|
||
|
progress presently, and an equal number of literary projects. While the
|
||
|
two fields have somewhat different approaches to textual editing, there
|
||
|
are ways in which electronic technology can be of service to both.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Since few of the editors involved in the Founding Fathers CD-ROM editions
|
||
|
are technical experts in any sense, I hope to point out in my discussion
|
||
|
of our experience how many of these electronic innovations can be used
|
||
|
successfully by scholars who are novices in the world of new technology.
|
||
|
One of the major concerns of the sponsors of the multitude of new
|
||
|
scholarly editions is the limited audience reached by the published
|
||
|
volumes. Most of these editions are being published in small quantities
|
||
|
and the publishers' price for them puts them out of the reach not only of
|
||
|
individual scholars but of most public libraries and all but the largest
|
||
|
educational institutions. However, little attention is being given to
|
||
|
ways in which technology can bypass conventional publication to make
|
||
|
historical and literary documents more widely available.
|
||
|
|
||
|
What attracted us most to the CD-ROM edition of The Papers of George
|
||
|
Washington was the fact that David Packard's aim was to make a complete
|
||
|
edition of all of the 135,000 documents we have collected available in an
|
||
|
inexpensive format that would be placed in public libraries, small
|
||
|
colleges, and even high schools. This would provide an audience far
|
||
|
beyond our present 1,000-copy, $45 published edition. Since the CD-ROM
|
||
|
edition will carry none of the explanatory annotation that appears in the
|
||
|
published volumes, we also feel that the use of the CD-ROM will lead many
|
||
|
researchers to seek out the published volumes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In addition to ignorance of new technical advances, I have found that too
|
||
|
many editors--and historians and literary scholars--are resistant and
|
||
|
even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their
|
||
|
work. I intend to discuss some of the arguments traditionalists are
|
||
|
advancing to resist technology, ranging from distrust of the speed with
|
||
|
which it changes (we are already wondering what is out there that is
|
||
|
better than CD-ROM) to suspicion of the technical language used to
|
||
|
describe electronic developments.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Maria LEBRON
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, a joint venture of the
|
||
|
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Online
|
||
|
Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), is the first peer-reviewed journal
|
||
|
to provide full text, tabular material, and line illustrations on line.
|
||
|
This presentation will discuss the genesis and start-up period of the
|
||
|
journal. Topics of discussion will include historical overview,
|
||
|
day-to-day management of the editorial peer review, and manuscript
|
||
|
tagging and publication. A demonstration of the journal and its features
|
||
|
will accompany the presentation.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Lynne PERSONIUS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Cornell University Library, Cornell Information Technologies, and Xerox
|
||
|
Corporation, with the support of the Commission on Preservation and
|
||
|
Access, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., have been collaborating in a project
|
||
|
to test a prototype system for recording brittle books as digital images
|
||
|
and producing, on demand, high-quality archival paper replacements. The
|
||
|
project goes beyond that, however, to investigate some of the issues
|
||
|
surrounding scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to
|
||
|
digital images in a network environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Joint Study in Digital Preservation began in January 1990. Xerox
|
||
|
provided the College Library Access and Storage System (CLASS) software,
|
||
|
a prototype 600-dots-per-inch (dpi) scanner, and the hardware necessary
|
||
|
to support network printing on the DocuTech printer housed in Cornell's
|
||
|
Computing and Communications Center (CCC).
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Cornell staff using the hardware and software became an integral part
|
||
|
of the development and testing process for enhancements to the CLASS
|
||
|
software system. The collaborative nature of this relationship is
|
||
|
resulting in a system that is specifically tailored to the preservation
|
||
|
application.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A digital library of 1,000 volumes (or approximately 300,000 images) has
|
||
|
been created and is stored on an optical jukebox that resides in CCC.
|
||
|
The library includes a collection of select mathematics monographs that
|
||
|
provides mathematics faculty with an opportunity to use the electronic
|
||
|
library. The remaining volumes were chosen for the library to test the
|
||
|
various capabilities of the scanning system.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One project objective is to provide users of the Cornell library and the
|
||
|
library staff with the ability to request facsimiles of digitized images
|
||
|
or to retrieve the actual electronic image for browsing. A prototype
|
||
|
viewing workstation has been created by Xerox, with input into the design
|
||
|
by a committee of Cornell librarians and computer professionals. This
|
||
|
will allow us to experiment with patron access to the images that make up
|
||
|
the digital library. The viewing station provides search, retrieval, and
|
||
|
(ultimately) printing functions with enhancements to facilitate
|
||
|
navigation through multiple documents.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Cornell currently is working to extend access to the digital library to
|
||
|
readers using workstations from their offices. This year is devoted to
|
||
|
the development of a network resident image conversion and delivery
|
||
|
server, and client software that will support readers who use Apple
|
||
|
Macintosh computers, IBM windows platforms, and Sun workstations.
|
||
|
Equipment for this development was provided by Sun Microsystems with
|
||
|
support from the Commission on Preservation and Access.
|
||
|
|
||
|
During the show-and-tell session of the Workshop on Electronic Texts, a
|
||
|
prototype view station will be demonstrated. In addition, a display of
|
||
|
original library books that have been digitized will be available for
|
||
|
review with associated printed copies for comparison. The fifteen-minute
|
||
|
overview of the project will include a slide presentation that
|
||
|
constitutes a "tour" of the preservation digitizing process.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The final network-connected version of the viewing station will provide
|
||
|
library users with another mechanism for accessing the digital library,
|
||
|
and will also provide the capability of viewing images directly. This
|
||
|
will not require special software, although a powerful computer with good
|
||
|
graphics will be needed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Joint Study in Digital Preservation has generated a great deal of
|
||
|
interest in the library community. Unfortunately, or perhaps
|
||
|
fortunately, this project serves to raise a vast number of other issues
|
||
|
surrounding the use of digital technology for the preservation and use of
|
||
|
deteriorating library materials, which subsequent projects will need to
|
||
|
examine. Much work remains.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION III
|
||
|
|
||
|
Howard BESSER Networking Multimedia Databases
|
||
|
|
||
|
What do we have to consider in building and distributing databases of
|
||
|
visual materials in a multi-user environment? This presentation examines
|
||
|
a variety of concerns that need to be addressed before a multimedia
|
||
|
database can be set up in a networked environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the past it has not been feasible to implement databases of visual
|
||
|
materials in shared-user environments because of technological barriers.
|
||
|
Each of the two basic models for multi-user multimedia databases has
|
||
|
posed its own problem. The analog multimedia storage model (represented
|
||
|
by Project Athena's parallel analog and digital networks) has required an
|
||
|
incredibly complex (and expensive) infrastructure. The economies of
|
||
|
scale that make multi-user setups cheaper per user served do not operate
|
||
|
in an environment that requires a computer workstation, videodisc player,
|
||
|
and two display devices for each user.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The digital multimedia storage model has required vast amounts of storage
|
||
|
space (as much as one gigabyte per thirty still images). In the past the
|
||
|
cost of such a large amount of storage space made this model a
|
||
|
prohibitive choice as well. But plunging storage costs are finally
|
||
|
making this second alternative viable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
If storage no longer poses such an impediment, what do we need to
|
||
|
consider in building digitally stored multi-user databases of visual
|
||
|
materials? This presentation will examine the networking and
|
||
|
telecommunication constraints that must be overcome before such databases
|
||
|
can become commonplace and useful to a large number of people.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The key problem is the vast size of multimedia documents, and how this
|
||
|
affects not only storage but telecommunications transmission time.
|
||
|
Anything slower than T-1 speed is impractical for files of 1 megabyte or
|
||
|
larger (which is likely to be small for a multimedia document). For
|
||
|
instance, even on a 56 Kb line it would take three minutes to transfer a
|
||
|
1-megabyte file. And these figures assume ideal circumstances, and do
|
||
|
not take into consideration other users contending for network bandwidth,
|
||
|
disk access time, or the time needed for remote display. Current common
|
||
|
telephone transmission rates would be completely impractical; few users
|
||
|
would be willing to wait the hour necessary to transmit a single image at
|
||
|
2400 baud.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This necessitates compression, which itself raises a number of other
|
||
|
issues. In order to decrease file sizes significantly, we must employ
|
||
|
lossy compression algorithms. But how much quality can we afford to
|
||
|
lose? To date there has been only one significant study done of
|
||
|
image-quality needs for a particular user group, and this study did not
|
||
|
look at loss resulting from compression. Only after identifying
|
||
|
image-quality needs can we begin to address storage and network bandwidth
|
||
|
needs.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Experience with X-Windows-based applications (such as Imagequery, the
|
||
|
University of California at Berkeley image database) demonstrates the
|
||
|
utility of a client-server topology, but also points to the limitation of
|
||
|
current software for a distributed environment. For example,
|
||
|
applications like Imagequery can incorporate compression, but current X
|
||
|
implementations do not permit decompression at the end user's
|
||
|
workstation. Such decompression at the host computer alleviates storage
|
||
|
capacity problems while doing nothing to address problems of
|
||
|
telecommunications bandwidth.
|
||
|
|
||
|
We need to examine the effects on network through-put of moving
|
||
|
multimedia documents around on a network. We need to examine various
|
||
|
topologies that will help us avoid bottlenecks around servers and
|
||
|
gateways. Experience with applications such as these raise still broader
|
||
|
questions. How closely is the multimedia document tied to the software
|
||
|
for viewing it? Can it be accessed and viewed from other applications?
|
||
|
Experience with the MARC format (and more recently with the Z39.50
|
||
|
protocols) shows how useful it can be to store documents in a form in
|
||
|
which they can be accessed by a variety of application software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finally, from an intellectual-access standpoint, we need to address the
|
||
|
issue of providing access to these multimedia documents in
|
||
|
interdisciplinary environments. We need to examine terminology and
|
||
|
indexing strategies that will allow us to provide access to this material
|
||
|
in a cross-disciplinary way.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ronald LARSEN Directions in High-Performance Networking for
|
||
|
Libraries
|
||
|
|
||
|
The pace at which computing technology has advanced over the past forty
|
||
|
years shows no sign of abating. Roughly speaking, each five-year period
|
||
|
has yielded an order-of-magnitude improvement in price and performance of
|
||
|
computing equipment. No fundamental hurdles are likely to prevent this
|
||
|
pace from continuing for at least the next decade. It is only in the
|
||
|
past five years, though, that computing has become ubiquitous in
|
||
|
libraries, affecting all staff and patrons, directly or indirectly.
|
||
|
|
||
|
During these same five years, communications rates on the Internet, the
|
||
|
principal academic computing network, have grown from 56 kbps to 1.5
|
||
|
Mbps, and the NSFNet backbone is now running 45 Mbps. Over the next five
|
||
|
years, communication rates on the backbone are expected to exceed 1 Gbps.
|
||
|
Growth in both the population of network users and the volume of network
|
||
|
traffic has continued to grow geometrically, at rates approaching 15
|
||
|
percent per month. This flood of capacity and use, likened by some to
|
||
|
"drinking from a firehose," creates immense opportunities and challenges
|
||
|
for libraries. Libraries must anticipate the future implications of this
|
||
|
technology, participate in its development, and deploy it to ensure
|
||
|
access to the world's information resources.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The infrastructure for the information age is being put in place.
|
||
|
Libraries face strategic decisions about their role in the development,
|
||
|
deployment, and use of this infrastructure. The emerging infrastructure
|
||
|
is much more than computers and communication lines. It is more than the
|
||
|
ability to compute at a remote site, send electronic mail to a peer
|
||
|
across the country, or move a file from one library to another. The next
|
||
|
five years will witness substantial development of the information
|
||
|
infrastructure of the network.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In order to provide appropriate leadership, library professionals must
|
||
|
have a fundamental understanding of and appreciation for computer
|
||
|
networking, from local area networks to the National Research and
|
||
|
Education Network (NREN). This presentation addresses these
|
||
|
fundamentals, and how they relate to libraries today and in the near
|
||
|
future.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Edwin BROWNRIGG Electronic Library Visions and Realities
|
||
|
|
||
|
The electronic library has been a vision desired by many--and rejected by
|
||
|
some--since Vannevar Bush coined the term memex to describe an automated,
|
||
|
intelligent, personal information system. Variations on this vision have
|
||
|
included Ted Nelson's Xanadau, Alan Kay's Dynabook, and Lancaster's
|
||
|
"paperless library," with the most recent incarnation being the
|
||
|
"Knowledge Navigator" described by John Scully of Apple. But the reality
|
||
|
of library service has been less visionary and the leap to the electronic
|
||
|
library has eluded universities, publishers, and information technology
|
||
|
files.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Memex Research Institute (MemRI), an independent, nonprofit research
|
||
|
and development organization, has created an Electronic Library Program
|
||
|
of shared research and development in order to make the collective vision
|
||
|
more concrete. The program is working toward the creation of large,
|
||
|
indexed publicly available electronic image collections of published
|
||
|
documents in academic, special, and public libraries. This strategic
|
||
|
plan is the result of the first stage of the program, which has been an
|
||
|
investigation of the information technologies available to support such
|
||
|
an effort, the economic parameters of electronic service compared to
|
||
|
traditional library operations, and the business and political factors
|
||
|
affecting the shift from print distribution to electronic networked
|
||
|
access.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The strategic plan envisions a combination of publicly searchable access
|
||
|
databases, image (and text) document collections stored on network "file
|
||
|
servers," local and remote network access, and an intellectual property
|
||
|
management-control system. This combination of technology and
|
||
|
information content is defined in this plan as an E-library or E-library
|
||
|
collection. Some participating sponsors are already developing projects
|
||
|
based on MemRI's recommended directions.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The E-library strategy projected in this plan is a visionary one that can
|
||
|
enable major changes and improvements in academic, public, and special
|
||
|
library service. This vision is, though, one that can be realized with
|
||
|
today's technology. At the same time, it will challenge the political
|
||
|
and social structure within which libraries operate: in academic
|
||
|
libraries, the traditional emphasis on local collections, extending to
|
||
|
accreditation issues; in public libraries, the potential of electronic
|
||
|
branch and central libraries fully available to the public; and for
|
||
|
special libraries, new opportunities for shared collections and networks.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The environment in which this strategic plan has been developed is, at
|
||
|
the moment, dominated by a sense of library limits. The continued
|
||
|
expansion and rapid growth of local academic library collections is now
|
||
|
clearly at an end. Corporate libraries, and even law libraries, are
|
||
|
faced with operating within a difficult economic climate, as well as with
|
||
|
very active competition from commercial information sources. For
|
||
|
example, public libraries may be seen as a desirable but not critical
|
||
|
municipal service in a time when the budgets of safety and health
|
||
|
agencies are being cut back.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Further, libraries in general have a very high labor-to-cost ratio in
|
||
|
their budgets, and labor costs are still increasing, notwithstanding
|
||
|
automation investments. It is difficult for libraries to obtain capital,
|
||
|
startup, or seed funding for innovative activities, and those
|
||
|
technology-intensive initiatives that offer the potential of decreased
|
||
|
labor costs can provoke the opposition of library staff.
|
||
|
|
||
|
However, libraries have achieved some considerable successes in the past
|
||
|
two decades by improving both their service and their credibility within
|
||
|
their organizations--and these positive changes have been accomplished
|
||
|
mostly with judicious use of information technologies. The advances in
|
||
|
computing and information technology have been well-chronicled: the
|
||
|
continuing precipitous drop in computing costs, the growth of the
|
||
|
Internet and private networks, and the explosive increase in publicly
|
||
|
available information databases.
|
||
|
|
||
|
For example, OCLC has become one of the largest computer network
|
||
|
organizations in the world by creating a cooperative cataloging network
|
||
|
of more than 6,000 libraries worldwide. On-line public access catalogs
|
||
|
now serve millions of users on more than 50,000 dedicated terminals in
|
||
|
the United States alone. The University of California MELVYL on-line
|
||
|
catalog system has now expanded into an index database reference service
|
||
|
and supports more than six million searches a year. And, libraries have
|
||
|
become the largest group of customers of CD-ROM publishing technology;
|
||
|
more than 30,000 optical media publications such as those offered by
|
||
|
InfoTrac and Silver Platter are subscribed to by U.S. libraries.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This march of technology continues and in the next decade will result in
|
||
|
further innovations that are extremely difficult to predict. What is
|
||
|
clear is that libraries can now go beyond automation of their order files
|
||
|
and catalogs to automation of their collections themselves--and it is
|
||
|
possible to circumvent the fiscal limitations that appear to obtain
|
||
|
today.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This Electronic Library Strategic Plan recommends a paradigm shift in
|
||
|
library service, and demonstrates the steps necessary to provide improved
|
||
|
library services with limited capacities and operating investments.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION IV-A
|
||
|
|
||
|
Anne KENNEY
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Cornell/Xerox Joint Study in Digital Preservation resulted in the
|
||
|
recording of 1,000 brittle books as 600-dpi digital images and the
|
||
|
production, on demand, of high-quality and archivally sound paper
|
||
|
replacements. The project, which was supported by the Commission on
|
||
|
Preservation and Access, also investigated some of the issues surrounding
|
||
|
scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to digital images in
|
||
|
a network environment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Anne Kenney will focus on some of the issues surrounding direct scanning
|
||
|
as identified in the Cornell Xerox Project. Among those to be discussed
|
||
|
are: image versus text capture; indexing and access; image-capture
|
||
|
capabilities; a comparison to photocopy and microfilm; production and
|
||
|
cost analysis; storage formats, protocols, and standards; and the use of
|
||
|
this scanning technology for preservation purposes.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The 600-dpi digital images produced in the Cornell Xerox Project proved
|
||
|
highly acceptable for creating paper replacements of deteriorating
|
||
|
originals. The 1,000 scanned volumes provided an array of image-capture
|
||
|
challenges that are common to nineteenth-century printing techniques and
|
||
|
embrittled material, and that defy the use of text-conversion processes.
|
||
|
These challenges include diminished contrast between text and background,
|
||
|
fragile and deteriorated pages, uneven printing, elaborate type faces,
|
||
|
faint and bold text adjacency, handwritten text and annotations, nonRoman
|
||
|
languages, and a proliferation of illustrated material embedded in text.
|
||
|
The latter category included high-frequency and low-frequency halftones,
|
||
|
continuous tone photographs, intricate mathematical drawings, maps,
|
||
|
etchings, reverse-polarity drawings, and engravings.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Xerox prototype scanning system provided a number of important
|
||
|
features for capturing this diverse material. Technicians used multiple
|
||
|
threshold settings, filters, line art and halftone definitions,
|
||
|
autosegmentation, windowing, and software-editing programs to optimize
|
||
|
image capture. At the same time, this project focused on production.
|
||
|
The goal was to make scanning as affordable and acceptable as
|
||
|
photocopying and microfilming for preservation reformatting. A
|
||
|
time-and-cost study conducted during the last three months of this
|
||
|
project confirmed the economic viability of digital scanning, and these
|
||
|
findings will be discussed here.
|
||
|
|
||
|
From the outset, the Cornell Xerox Project was predicated on the use of
|
||
|
nonproprietary standards and the use of common protocols when standards
|
||
|
did not exist. Digital files were created as TIFF images which were
|
||
|
compressed prior to storage using Group 4 CCITT compression. The Xerox
|
||
|
software is MS DOS based and utilizes off-the shelf programs such as
|
||
|
Microsoft Windows and Wang Image Wizard. The digital library is designed
|
||
|
to be hardware-independent and to provide interchangeability with other
|
||
|
institutions through network connections. Access to the digital files
|
||
|
themselves is two-tiered: Bibliographic records for the computer files
|
||
|
are created in RLIN and Cornell's local system and access into the actual
|
||
|
digital images comprising a book is provided through a document control
|
||
|
structure and a networked image file-server, both of which will be
|
||
|
described.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The presentation will conclude with a discussion of some of the issues
|
||
|
surrounding the use of this technology as a preservation tool (storage,
|
||
|
refreshing, backup).
|
||
|
|
||
|
Pamela ANDRE and Judith ZIDAR
|
||
|
|
||
|
The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has had extensive experience with
|
||
|
raster scanning of printed materials. Since 1987, the Library has
|
||
|
participated in the National Agricultural Text Digitizing Project (NATDP)
|
||
|
a cooperative effort between NAL and forty-five land grant university
|
||
|
libraries. An overview of the project will be presented, giving its
|
||
|
history and NAL's strategy for the future.
|
||
|
|
||
|
An in-depth discussion of NATDP will follow, including a description of
|
||
|
the scanning process, from the gathering of the printed materials to the
|
||
|
archiving of the electronic pages. The type of equipment required for a
|
||
|
stand-alone scanning workstation and the importance of file management
|
||
|
software will be discussed. Issues concerning the images themselves will
|
||
|
be addressed briefly, such as image format; black and white versus color;
|
||
|
gray scale versus dithering; and resolution.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Also described will be a study currently in progress by NAL to evaluate
|
||
|
the usefulness of converting microfilm to electronic images in order to
|
||
|
improve access. With the cooperation of Tuskegee University, NAL has
|
||
|
selected three reels of microfilm from a collection of sixty-seven reels
|
||
|
containing the papers, letters, and drawings of George Washington Carver.
|
||
|
The three reels were converted into 3,500 electronic images using a
|
||
|
specialized microfilm scanner. The selection, filming, and indexing of
|
||
|
this material will be discussed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Donald WATERS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Project Open Book, the Yale University Library's effort to convert 10,
|
||
|
000 books from microfilm to digital imagery, is currently in an advanced
|
||
|
state of planning and organization. The Yale Library has selected a
|
||
|
major vendor to serve as a partner in the project and as systems
|
||
|
integrator. In its proposal, the successful vendor helped isolate areas
|
||
|
of risk and uncertainty as well as key issues to be addressed during the
|
||
|
life of the project. The Yale Library is now poised to decide what
|
||
|
material it will convert to digital image form and to seek funding,
|
||
|
initially for the first phase and then for the entire project.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The proposal that Yale accepted for the implementation of Project Open
|
||
|
Book will provide at the end of three phases a conversion subsystem,
|
||
|
browsing stations distributed on the campus network within the Yale
|
||
|
Library, a subsystem for storing 10,000 books at 200 and 600 dots per
|
||
|
inch, and network access to the image printers. Pricing for the system
|
||
|
implementation assumes the existence of Yale's campus ethernet network
|
||
|
and its high-speed image printers, and includes other requisite hardware
|
||
|
and software, as well as system integration services. Proposed operating
|
||
|
costs include hardware and software maintenance, but do not include
|
||
|
estimates for the facilities management of the storage devices and image
|
||
|
servers.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Yale selected its vendor partner in a formal process, partly funded by
|
||
|
the Commission for Preservation and Access. Following a request for
|
||
|
proposal, the Yale Library selected two vendors as finalists to work with
|
||
|
Yale staff to generate a detailed analysis of requirements for Project
|
||
|
Open Book. Each vendor used the results of the requirements analysis to
|
||
|
generate and submit a formal proposal for the entire project. This
|
||
|
competitive process not only enabled the Yale Library to select its
|
||
|
primary vendor partner but also revealed much about the state of the
|
||
|
imaging industry, about the varying, corporate commitments to the markets
|
||
|
for imaging technology, and about the varying organizational dynamics
|
||
|
through which major companies are responding to and seeking to develop
|
||
|
these markets.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Project Open Book is focused specifically on the conversion of images
|
||
|
from microfilm to digital form. The technology for scanning microfilm is
|
||
|
readily available but is changing rapidly. In its project requirements,
|
||
|
the Yale Library emphasized features of the technology that affect the
|
||
|
technical quality of digital image production and the costs of creating
|
||
|
and storing the image library: What levels of digital resolution can be
|
||
|
achieved by scanning microfilm? How does variation in the quality of
|
||
|
microfilm, particularly in film produced to preservation standards,
|
||
|
affect the quality of the digital images? What technologies can an
|
||
|
operator effectively and economically apply when scanning film to
|
||
|
separate two-up images and to control for and correct image
|
||
|
imperfections? How can quality control best be integrated into
|
||
|
digitizing work flow that includes document indexing and storage?
|
||
|
|
||
|
The actual and expected uses of digital images--storage, browsing,
|
||
|
printing, and OCR--help determine the standards for measuring their
|
||
|
quality. Browsing is especially important, but the facilities available
|
||
|
for readers to browse image documents is perhaps the weakest aspect of
|
||
|
imaging technology and most in need of development. As it defined its
|
||
|
requirements, the Yale Library concentrated on some fundamental aspects
|
||
|
of usability for image documents: Does the system have sufficient
|
||
|
flexibility to handle the full range of document types, including
|
||
|
monographs, multi-part and multivolume sets, and serials, as well as
|
||
|
manuscript collections? What conventions are necessary to identify a
|
||
|
document uniquely for storage and retrieval? Where is the database of
|
||
|
record for storing bibliographic information about the image document?
|
||
|
How are basic internal structures of documents, such as pagination, made
|
||
|
accessible to the reader? How are the image documents physically
|
||
|
presented on the screen to the reader?
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Yale Library designed Project Open Book on the assumption that
|
||
|
microfilm is more than adequate as a medium for preserving the content of
|
||
|
deteriorated library materials. As planning in the project has advanced,
|
||
|
it is increasingly clear that the challenge of digital image technology
|
||
|
and the key to the success of efforts like Project Open Book is to
|
||
|
provide a means of both preserving and improving access to those
|
||
|
deteriorated materials.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION IV-B
|
||
|
|
||
|
George THOMA
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the use of electronic imaging for document preservation, there are
|
||
|
several issues to consider, such as: ensuring adequate image quality,
|
||
|
maintaining substantial conversion rates (through-put), providing unique
|
||
|
identification for automated access and retrieval, and accommodating
|
||
|
bound volumes and fragile material.
|
||
|
|
||
|
To maintain high image quality, image processing functions are required
|
||
|
to correct the deficiencies in the scanned image. Some commercially
|
||
|
available systems include these functions, while some do not. The
|
||
|
scanned raw image must be processed to correct contrast deficiencies--
|
||
|
both poor overall contrast resulting from light print and/or dark
|
||
|
background, and variable contrast resulting from stains and
|
||
|
bleed-through. Furthermore, the scan density must be adequate to allow
|
||
|
legibility of print and sufficient fidelity in the pseudo-halftoned gray
|
||
|
material. Borders or page-edge effects must be removed for both
|
||
|
compactibility and aesthetics. Page skew must be corrected for aesthetic
|
||
|
reasons and to enable accurate character recognition if desired.
|
||
|
Compound images consisting of both two-toned text and gray-scale
|
||
|
illustrations must be processed appropriately to retain the quality of
|
||
|
each.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION IV-C
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jean BARONAS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Standards publications being developed by scientists, engineers, and
|
||
|
business managers in Association for Information and Image Management
|
||
|
(AIIM) standards committees can be applied to electronic image management
|
||
|
(EIM) processes including: document (image) transfer, retrieval and
|
||
|
evaluation; optical disk and document scanning; and document design and
|
||
|
conversion. When combined with EIM system planning and operations,
|
||
|
standards can assist in generating image databases that are
|
||
|
interchangeable among a variety of systems. The applications of
|
||
|
different approaches for image-tagging, indexing, compression, and
|
||
|
transfer often cause uncertainty concerning EIM system compatibility,
|
||
|
calibration, performance, and upward compatibility, until standard
|
||
|
implementation parameters are established. The AIIM standards that are
|
||
|
being developed for these applications can be used to decrease the
|
||
|
uncertainty, successfully integrate imaging processes, and promote "open
|
||
|
systems." AIIM is an accredited American National Standards Institute
|
||
|
(ANSI) standards developer with more than twenty committees comprised of
|
||
|
300 volunteers representing users, vendors, and manufacturers. The
|
||
|
standards publications that are developed in these committees have
|
||
|
national acceptance and provide the basis for international harmonization
|
||
|
in the development of new International Organization for Standardization
|
||
|
(ISO) standards.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This presentation describes the development of AIIM's EIM standards and a
|
||
|
new effort at AIIM, a database on standards projects in a wide framework
|
||
|
of imaging industries including capture, recording, processing,
|
||
|
duplication, distribution, display, evaluation, and preservation. The
|
||
|
AIIM Imagery Database will cover imaging standards being developed by
|
||
|
many organizations in many different countries. It will contain
|
||
|
standards publications' dates, origins, related national and
|
||
|
international projects, status, key words, and abstracts. The ANSI Image
|
||
|
Technology Standards Board requested that such a database be established,
|
||
|
as did the ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission Joint Task Force
|
||
|
on Imagery. AIIM will take on the leadership role for the database and
|
||
|
coordinate its development with several standards developers.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Patricia BATTIN
|
||
|
|
||
|
Characteristics of standards for digital imagery:
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Nature of digital technology implies continuing volatility.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Precipitous standard-setting not possible and probably not
|
||
|
desirable.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Standards are a complex issue involving the medium, the
|
||
|
hardware, the software, and the technical capacity for
|
||
|
reproductive fidelity and clarity.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* The prognosis for reliable archival standards (as defined by
|
||
|
librarians) in the foreseeable future is poor.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Significant potential and attractiveness of digital technology as a
|
||
|
preservation medium and access mechanism.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Productive use of digital imagery for preservation requires a
|
||
|
reconceptualizing of preservation principles in a volatile,
|
||
|
standardless world.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Concept of managing continuing access in the digital environment
|
||
|
rather than focusing on the permanence of the medium and long-term
|
||
|
archival standards developed for the analog world.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Transition period: How long and what to do?
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Redefine "archival."
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Remove the burden of "archival copy" from paper artifacts.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Use digital technology for storage, develop management
|
||
|
strategies for refreshing medium, hardware and software.
|
||
|
|
||
|
* Create acid-free paper copies for transition period backup
|
||
|
until we develop reliable procedures for ensuring continuing
|
||
|
access to digital files.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION IV-D
|
||
|
|
||
|
Stuart WEIBEL The Role of SGML Markup in the CORE Project (6)
|
||
|
|
||
|
The emergence of high-speed telecommunications networks as a basic
|
||
|
feature of the scholarly workplace is driving the demand for electronic
|
||
|
document delivery. Three distinct categories of electronic
|
||
|
publishing/republishing are necessary to support access demands in this
|
||
|
emerging environment:
|
||
|
|
||
|
1.) Conversion of paper or microfilm archives to electronic format
|
||
|
2.) Conversion of electronic files to formats tailored to
|
||
|
electronic retrieval and display
|
||
|
3.) Primary electronic publishing (materials for which the
|
||
|
electronic version is the primary format)
|
||
|
|
||
|
OCLC has experimental or product development activities in each of these
|
||
|
areas. Among the challenges that lie ahead is the integration of these
|
||
|
three types of information stores in coherent distributed systems.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment) Project is a model for
|
||
|
the conversion of large text and graphics collections for which
|
||
|
electronic typesetting files are available (category 2). The American
|
||
|
Chemical Society has made available computer typography files dating from
|
||
|
1980 for its twenty journals. This collection of some 250 journal-years
|
||
|
is being converted to an electronic format that will be accessible
|
||
|
through several end-user applications.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) offers the means
|
||
|
to capture the structural richness of the original articles in a way that
|
||
|
will support a variety of retrieval, navigation, and display options
|
||
|
necessary to navigate effectively in very large text databases.
|
||
|
|
||
|
An SGML document consists of text that is marked up with descriptive tags
|
||
|
that specify the function of a given element within the document. As a
|
||
|
formal language construct, an SGML document can be parsed against a
|
||
|
document-type definition (DTD) that unambiguously defines what elements
|
||
|
are allowed and where in the document they can (or must) occur. This
|
||
|
formalized map of article structure allows the user interface design to
|
||
|
be uncoupled from the underlying database system, an important step
|
||
|
toward interoperability. Demonstration of this separability is a part of
|
||
|
the CORE project, wherein user interface designs born of very different
|
||
|
philosophies will access the same database.
|
||
|
|
||
|
NOTES:
|
||
|
(6) The CORE project is a collaboration among Cornell University's
|
||
|
Mann Library, Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), the American
|
||
|
Chemical Society (ACS), the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and
|
||
|
OCLC.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Michael LESK The CORE Electronic Chemistry Library
|
||
|
|
||
|
A major on-line file of chemical journal literature complete with
|
||
|
graphics is being developed to test the usability of fully electronic
|
||
|
access to documents, as a joint project of Cornell University, the
|
||
|
American Chemical Society, the Chemical Abstracts Service, OCLC, and
|
||
|
Bellcore (with additional support from Sun Microsystems, Springer-Verlag,
|
||
|
DigitaI Equipment Corporation, Sony Corporation of America, and Apple
|
||
|
Computers). Our file contains the American Chemical Society's on-line
|
||
|
journals, supplemented with the graphics from the paper publication. The
|
||
|
indexing of the articles from Chemical Abstracts Documents is available
|
||
|
in both image and text format, and several different interfaces can be
|
||
|
used. Our goals are (1) to assess the effectiveness and acceptability of
|
||
|
electronic access to primary journals as compared with paper, and (2) to
|
||
|
identify the most desirable functions of the user interface to an
|
||
|
electronic system of journals, including in particular a comparison of
|
||
|
page-image display with ASCII display interfaces. Early experiments with
|
||
|
chemistry students on a variety of tasks suggest that searching tasks are
|
||
|
completed much faster with any electronic system than with paper, but
|
||
|
that for reading all versions of the articles are roughly equivalent.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Pamela ANDRE and Judith ZIDAR
|
||
|
|
||
|
Text conversion is far more expensive and time-consuming than image
|
||
|
capture alone. NAL's experience with optical character recognition (OCR)
|
||
|
will be related and compared with the experience of having text rekeyed.
|
||
|
What factors affect OCR accuracy? How accurate does full text have to be
|
||
|
in order to be useful? How do different users react to imperfect text?
|
||
|
These are questions that will be explored. For many, a service bureau
|
||
|
may be a better solution than performing the work inhouse; this will also
|
||
|
be discussed.
|
||
|
|
||
|
SESSION VI
|
||
|
|
||
|
Marybeth PETERS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Copyright law protects creative works. Protection granted by the law to
|
||
|
authors and disseminators of works includes the right to do or authorize
|
||
|
the following: reproduce the work, prepare derivative works, distribute
|
||
|
the work to the public, and publicly perform or display the work. In
|
||
|
addition, copyright owners of sound recordings and computer programs have
|
||
|
the right to control rental of their works. These rights are not
|
||
|
unlimited; there are a number of exceptions and limitations.
|
||
|
|
||
|
An electronic environment places strains on the copyright system.
|
||
|
Copyright owners want to control uses of their work and be paid for any
|
||
|
use; the public wants quick and easy access at little or no cost. The
|
||
|
marketplace is working in this area. Contracts, guidelines on electronic
|
||
|
use, and collective licensing are in use and being refined.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Issues concerning the ability to change works without detection are more
|
||
|
difficult to deal with. Questions concerning the integrity of the work
|
||
|
and the status of the changed version under the copyright law are to be
|
||
|
addressed. These are public policy issues which require informed
|
||
|
dialogue.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Appendix III: DIRECTORY OF PARTICIPANTS
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
PRESENTERS:
|
||
|
|
||
|
Pamela Q.J. Andre
|
||
|
Associate Director, Automation
|
||
|
National Agricultural Library
|
||
|
10301 Baltimore Boulevard
|
||
|
Beltsville, MD 20705-2351
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 504-6813
|
||
|
Fax: (301) 504-7473
|
||
|
E-mail: INTERNET: PANDRE@ASRR.ARSUSDA.GOV
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jean Baronas, Senior Manager
|
||
|
Department of Standards and Technology
|
||
|
Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)
|
||
|
1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100
|
||
|
Silver Spring, MD 20910
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 587-8202
|
||
|
Fax: (301) 587-2711
|
||
|
|
||
|
Patricia Battin, President
|
||
|
The Commission on Preservation and Access
|
||
|
1400 16th Street, N.W.
|
||
|
Suite 740
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20036-2217
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 939-3400
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 939-3407
|
||
|
E-mail: CPA@GWUVM.BITNET
|
||
|
|
||
|
Howard Besser
|
||
|
Centre Canadien d'Architecture
|
||
|
(Canadian Center for Architecture)
|
||
|
1920, rue Baile
|
||
|
Montreal, Quebec H3H 2S6
|
||
|
CANADA
|
||
|
Phone: (514) 939-7001
|
||
|
Fax: (514) 939-7020
|
||
|
E-mail: howard@lis.pitt.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
Edwin B. Brownrigg, Executive Director
|
||
|
Memex Research Institute
|
||
|
422 Bonita Avenue
|
||
|
Roseville, CA 95678
|
||
|
Phone: (916) 784-2298
|
||
|
Fax: (916) 786-7559
|
||
|
E-mail: BITNET: MEMEX@CALSTATE.2
|
||
|
|
||
|
Eric M. Calaluca, Vice President
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey, Inc.
|
||
|
1101 King Street
|
||
|
Alexandria, VA 223l4
|
||
|
Phone: (800) 752-05l5
|
||
|
Fax: (703) 683-7589
|
||
|
|
||
|
James Daly
|
||
|
4015 Deepwood Road
|
||
|
Baltimore, MD 21218-1404
|
||
|
Phone: (410) 235-0763
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ricky Erway, Associate Coordinator
|
||
|
American Memory
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-6233
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-3764
|
||
|
|
||
|
Carl Fleischhauer, Coordinator
|
||
|
American Memory
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-6233
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-3764
|
||
|
|
||
|
Joanne Freeman
|
||
|
2000 Jefferson Park Avenue, No. 7
|
||
|
Charlottesville, VA 22903
|
||
|
|
||
|
Prosser Gifford
|
||
|
Director for Scholarly Programs
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-1517
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-9898
|
||
|
E-mail: pgif@seq1.loc.gov
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jacqueline Hess, Director
|
||
|
National Demonstration Laboratory
|
||
|
for Interactive Information Technologies
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-4157
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-2829
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan Hockey, Director
|
||
|
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH)
|
||
|
Alexander Library
|
||
|
Rutgers University
|
||
|
169 College Avenue
|
||
|
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
|
||
|
Phone: (908) 932-1384
|
||
|
Fax: (908) 932-1386
|
||
|
E-mail: hockey@zodiac.rutgers.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
William L. Hooton, Vice President
|
||
|
Business & Technical Development
|
||
|
Imaging & Information Systems Group
|
||
|
I-NET
|
||
|
6430 Rockledge Drive, Suite 400
|
||
|
Bethesda, MD 208l7
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 564-6750
|
||
|
Fax: (513) 564-6867
|
||
|
|
||
|
Anne R. Kenney, Associate Director
|
||
|
Department of Preservation and Conservation
|
||
|
701 Olin Library
|
||
|
Cornell University
|
||
|
Ithaca, NY 14853
|
||
|
Phone: (607) 255-6875
|
||
|
Fax: (607) 255-9346
|
||
|
E-mail: LYDY@CORNELLA.BITNET
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ronald L. Larsen
|
||
|
Associate Director for Information Technology
|
||
|
University of Maryland at College Park
|
||
|
Room B0224, McKeldin Library
|
||
|
College Park, MD 20742-7011
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 405-9194
|
||
|
Fax: (301) 314-9865
|
||
|
E-mail: rlarsen@libr.umd.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
Maria L. Lebron, Managing Editor
|
||
|
The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials
|
||
|
l333 H Street, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20005
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 326-6735
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 842-2868
|
||
|
E-mail: PUBSAAAS@GWUVM.BITNET
|
||
|
|
||
|
Michael Lesk, Executive Director
|
||
|
Computer Science Research
|
||
|
Bell Communications Research, Inc.
|
||
|
Rm 2A-385
|
||
|
445 South Street
|
||
|
Morristown, NJ 07960-l9l0
|
||
|
Phone: (201) 829-4070
|
||
|
Fax: (201) 829-5981
|
||
|
E-mail: lesk@bellcore.com (Internet) or bellcore!lesk (uucp)
|
||
|
|
||
|
Clifford A. Lynch
|
||
|
Director, Library Automation
|
||
|
University of California,
|
||
|
Office of the President
|
||
|
300 Lakeside Drive, 8th Floor
|
||
|
Oakland, CA 94612-3350
|
||
|
Phone: (510) 987-0522
|
||
|
Fax: (510) 839-3573
|
||
|
E-mail: calur@uccmvsa
|
||
|
|
||
|
Avra Michelson
|
||
|
National Archives and Records Administration
|
||
|
NSZ Rm. 14N
|
||
|
7th & Pennsylvania, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, D.C. 20408
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 501-5544
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 501-5533
|
||
|
E-mail: tmi@cu.nih.gov
|
||
|
|
||
|
Elli Mylonas, Managing Editor
|
||
|
Perseus Project
|
||
|
Department of the Classics
|
||
|
Harvard University
|
||
|
319 Boylston Hall
|
||
|
Cambridge, MA 02138
|
||
|
Phone: (617) 495-9025, (617) 495-0456 (direct)
|
||
|
Fax: (617) 496-8886
|
||
|
E-mail: Elli@IKAROS.Harvard.EDU or elli@wjh12.harvard.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
David Woodley Packard
|
||
|
Packard Humanities Institute
|
||
|
300 Second Street, Suite 201
|
||
|
Los Altos, CA 94002
|
||
|
Phone: (415) 948-0150 (PHI)
|
||
|
Fax: (415) 948-5793
|
||
|
|
||
|
Lynne K. Personius, Assistant Director
|
||
|
Cornell Information Technologies for
|
||
|
Scholarly Information Sources
|
||
|
502 Olin Library
|
||
|
Cornell University
|
||
|
Ithaca, NY 14853
|
||
|
Phone: (607) 255-3393
|
||
|
Fax: (607) 255-9346
|
||
|
E-mail: JRN@CORNELLC.BITNET
|
||
|
|
||
|
Marybeth Peters
|
||
|
Policy Planning Adviser to the
|
||
|
Register of Copyrights
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Office LM 403
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-8350
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-8366
|
||
|
|
||
|
C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen
|
||
|
Editor, Text Encoding Initiative
|
||
|
Computer Center (M/C 135)
|
||
|
University of Illinois at Chicago
|
||
|
Box 6998
|
||
|
Chicago, IL 60680
|
||
|
Phone: (312) 413-0317
|
||
|
Fax: (312) 996-6834
|
||
|
E-mail: u35395@uicvm..cc.uic.edu or u35395@uicvm.bitnet
|
||
|
|
||
|
George R. Thoma, Chief
|
||
|
Communications Engineering Branch
|
||
|
National Library of Medicine
|
||
|
8600 Rockville Pike
|
||
|
Bethesda, MD 20894
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 496-4496
|
||
|
Fax: (301) 402-0341
|
||
|
E-mail: thoma@lhc.nlm.nih.gov
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dorothy Twohig, Editor
|
||
|
The Papers of George Washington
|
||
|
504 Alderman Library
|
||
|
University of Virginia
|
||
|
Charlottesville, VA 22903-2498
|
||
|
Phone: (804) 924-0523
|
||
|
Fax: (804) 924-4337
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan H. Veccia, Team leader
|
||
|
American Memory, User Evaluation
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
American Memory Evaluation Project
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-9104
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-3764
|
||
|
E-mail: svec@seq1.loc.gov
|
||
|
|
||
|
Donald J. Waters, Head
|
||
|
Systems Office
|
||
|
Yale University Library
|
||
|
New Haven, CT 06520
|
||
|
Phone: (203) 432-4889
|
||
|
Fax: (203) 432-7231
|
||
|
E-mail: DWATERS@YALEVM.BITNET or DWATERS@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU
|
||
|
|
||
|
Stuart Weibel, Senior Research Scientist
|
||
|
OCLC
|
||
|
6565 Frantz Road
|
||
|
Dublin, OH 43017
|
||
|
Phone: (614) 764-608l
|
||
|
Fax: (614) 764-2344
|
||
|
E-mail: INTERNET: Stu@rsch.oclc.org
|
||
|
|
||
|
Robert G. Zich
|
||
|
Special Assistant to the Associate Librarian
|
||
|
for Special Projects
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-6233
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-3764
|
||
|
E-mail: rzic@seq1.loc.gov
|
||
|
|
||
|
Judith A. Zidar, Coordinator
|
||
|
National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program
|
||
|
Information Systems Division
|
||
|
National Agricultural Library
|
||
|
10301 Baltimore Boulevard
|
||
|
Beltsville, MD 20705-2351
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 504-6813 or 504-5853
|
||
|
Fax: (301) 504-7473
|
||
|
E-mail: INTERNET: JZIDAR@ASRR.ARSUSDA.GOV
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
OBSERVERS:
|
||
|
|
||
|
Helen Aguera, Program Officer
|
||
|
Division of Research
|
||
|
Room 318
|
||
|
National Endowment for the Humanities
|
||
|
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, D.C. 20506
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 786-0358
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 786-0243
|
||
|
|
||
|
M. Ellyn Blanton, Deputy Director
|
||
|
National Demonstration Laboratory
|
||
|
for Interactive Information Technologies
|
||
|
Library of Congress
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 707-4157
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 707-2829
|
||
|
|
||
|
Charles M. Dollar
|
||
|
National Archives and Records Administration
|
||
|
NSZ Rm. 14N
|
||
|
7th & Pennsylvania, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20408
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 501-5532
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 501-5512
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jeffrey Field, Deputy to the Director
|
||
|
Division of Preservation and Access
|
||
|
Room 802
|
||
|
National Endowment for the Humanities
|
||
|
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20506
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 786-0570
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 786-0243
|
||
|
|
||
|
Lorrin Garson
|
||
|
American Chemical Society
|
||
|
Research and Development Department
|
||
|
1155 16th Street, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, D.C. 20036
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 872-4541
|
||
|
Fax: E-mail: INTERNET: LRG96@ACS.ORG
|
||
|
|
||
|
William M. Holmes, Jr.
|
||
|
National Archives and Records Administration
|
||
|
NSZ Rm. 14N
|
||
|
7th & Pennsylvania, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20408
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 501-5540
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 501-5512
|
||
|
E-mail: WHOLMES@AMERICAN.EDU
|
||
|
|
||
|
Sperling Martin
|
||
|
Information Resource Management
|
||
|
20030 Doolittle Street
|
||
|
Gaithersburg, MD 20879
|
||
|
Phone: (301) 924-1803
|
||
|
|
||
|
Michael Neuman, Director
|
||
|
The Center for Text and Technology
|
||
|
Academic Computing Center
|
||
|
238 Reiss Science Building
|
||
|
Georgetown University
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20057
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 687-6096
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 687-6003
|
||
|
E-mail: neuman@guvax.bitnet, neuman@guvax.georgetown.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
Barbara Paulson, Program Officer
|
||
|
Division of Preservation and Access
|
||
|
Room 802
|
||
|
National Endowment for the Humanities
|
||
|
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20506
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 786-0577
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 786-0243
|
||
|
|
||
|
Allen H. Renear
|
||
|
Senior Academic Planning Analyst
|
||
|
Brown University Computing and Information Services
|
||
|
115 Waterman Street
|
||
|
Campus Box 1885
|
||
|
Providence, R.I. 02912
|
||
|
Phone: (401) 863-7312
|
||
|
Fax: (401) 863-7329
|
||
|
E-mail: BITNET: Allen@BROWNVM or
|
||
|
INTERNET: Allen@brownvm.brown.edu
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan M. Severtson, President
|
||
|
Chadwyck-Healey, Inc.
|
||
|
1101 King Street
|
||
|
Alexandria, VA 223l4
|
||
|
Phone: (800) 752-05l5
|
||
|
Fax: (703) 683-7589
|
||
|
|
||
|
Frank Withrow
|
||
|
U.S. Department of Education
|
||
|
555 New Jersey Avenue, N.W.
|
||
|
Washington, DC 20208-5644
|
||
|
Phone: (202) 219-2200
|
||
|
Fax: (202) 219-2106
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
(LC STAFF)
|
||
|
|
||
|
Linda L. Arret
|
||
|
Machine-Readable Collections Reading Room LJ 132
|
||
|
(202) 707-1490
|
||
|
|
||
|
John D. Byrum, Jr.
|
||
|
Descriptive Cataloging Division LM 540
|
||
|
(202) 707-5194
|
||
|
|
||
|
Mary Jane Cavallo
|
||
|
Science and Technology Division LA 5210
|
||
|
(202) 707-1219
|
||
|
|
||
|
Susan Thea David
|
||
|
Congressional Research Service LM 226
|
||
|
(202) 707-7169
|
||
|
|
||
|
Robert Dierker
|
||
|
Senior Adviser for Multimedia Activities LM 608
|
||
|
(202) 707-6151
|
||
|
|
||
|
William W. Ellis
|
||
|
Associate Librarian for Science and Technology LM 611
|
||
|
(202) 707-6928
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ronald Gephart
|
||
|
Manuscript Division LM 102
|
||
|
(202) 707-5097
|
||
|
|
||
|
James Graber
|
||
|
Information Technology Services LM G51
|
||
|
(202) 707-9628
|
||
|
|
||
|
Rich Greenfield
|
||
|
American Memory LM 603
|
||
|
(202) 707-6233
|
||
|
|
||
|
Rebecca Guenther
|
||
|
Network Development LM 639
|
||
|
(202) 707-5092
|
||
|
|
||
|
Kenneth E. Harris
|
||
|
Preservation LM G21
|
||
|
(202) 707-5213
|
||
|
|
||
|
Staley Hitchcock
|
||
|
Manuscript Division LM 102
|
||
|
(202) 707-5383
|
||
|
|
||
|
Bohdan Kantor
|
||
|
Office of Special Projects LM 612
|
||
|
(202) 707-0180
|
||
|
|
||
|
John W. Kimball, Jr
|
||
|
Machine-Readable Collections Reading Room LJ 132
|
||
|
(202) 707-6560
|
||
|
|
||
|
Basil Manns
|
||
|
Information Technology Services LM G51
|
||
|
(202) 707-8345
|
||
|
|
||
|
Sally Hart McCallum
|
||
|
Network Development LM 639
|
||
|
(202) 707-6237
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dana J. Pratt
|
||
|
Publishing Office LM 602
|
||
|
(202) 707-6027
|
||
|
|
||
|
Jane Riefenhauser
|
||
|
American Memory LM 603
|
||
|
(202) 707-6233
|
||
|
|
||
|
William Z. Schenck
|
||
|
Collections Development LM 650
|
||
|
(202) 707-7706
|
||
|
|
||
|
Chandru J. Shahani
|
||
|
Preservation Research and Testing Office (R&T) LM G38
|
||
|
(202) 707-5607
|
||
|
|
||
|
William J. Sittig
|
||
|
Collections Development LM 650
|
||
|
(202) 707-7050
|
||
|
|
||
|
Paul Smith
|
||
|
Manuscript Division LM 102
|
||
|
(202) 707-5097
|
||
|
|
||
|
James L. Stevens
|
||
|
Information Technology Services LM G51
|
||
|
(202) 707-9688
|
||
|
|
||
|
Karen Stuart
|
||
|
Manuscript Division LM 130
|
||
|
(202) 707-5389
|
||
|
|
||
|
Tamara Swora
|
||
|
Preservation Microfilming Office LM G05
|
||
|
(202) 707-6293
|
||
|
|
||
|
Sarah Thomas
|
||
|
Collections Cataloging LM 642
|
||
|
(202) 707-5333
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
END
|
||
|
*************************************************************
|
||
|
|
||
|
Note: This file has been edited for use on computer networks. This
|
||
|
editing required the removal of diacritics, underlining, and fonts such
|
||
|
as italics and bold.
|
||
|
|
||
|
kde 11/92
|
||
|
|
||
|
[A few of the italics (when used for emphasis) were replaced by CAPS mh]
|
||
|
|
||
|
*End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC ETEXTS
|
||
|
|