Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.

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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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.)

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

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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.