Part 15

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.