WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS

PROCEEDINGS

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]