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GIFFORD * Origin of Workshop in current Librarian's desire to make LC's
collections more widely available * Desiderata arising from the prospect
of greater interconnectedness *
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After welcoming participants on behalf of the Library of Congress,
American Memory (AM), and the National Demonstration Lab, Prosser
GIFFORD, director for scholarly programs, Library of Congress, located
the origin of the Workshop on Electronic Texts in a conversation he had
had considerably more than a year ago with Carl FLEISCHHAUER concerning
some of the issues faced by AM. On the assumption that numerous other
people were asking the same questions, the decision was made to bring
together as many of these people as possible to ask the same questions
together. In a deeper sense, GIFFORD said, the origin of the Workshop
lay in the desire of the current Librarian of Congress, James H.
Billington, to make the collections of the Library, especially those
offering unique or unusual testimony on aspects of the American
experience, available to a much wider circle of users than those few
people who can come to Washington to use them. This meant that the
emphasis of AM, from the outset, has been on archival collections of the
basic material, and on making these collections themselves available,
rather than selected or heavily edited products.
From AM's emphasis followed the questions with which the Workshop began:
who will use these materials, and in what form will they wish to use
them. But an even larger issue deserving mention, in GIFFORD's view, was
the phenomenal growth in Internet connectivity. He expressed the hope
that the prospect of greater interconnectedness than ever before would
lead to: 1) much more cooperative and mutually supportive endeavors; 2)
development of systems of shared and distributed responsibilities to
avoid duplication and to ensure accuracy and preservation of unique
materials; and 3) agreement on the necessary standards and development of
the appropriate directories and indices to make navigation
straightforward among the varied resources that are, and increasingly
will be, available. In this connection, GIFFORD requested that
participants reflect from the outset upon the sorts of outcomes they
thought the Workshop might have. Did those present constitute a group
with sufficient common interests to propose a next step or next steps,
and if so, what might those be? They would return to these questions the
following afternoon.
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FLEISCHHAUER * Core of Workshop concerns preparation and production of
materials * Special challenge in conversion of textual materials *
Quality versus quantity * Do the several groups represented share common
interests? *
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Carl FLEISCHHAUER, coordinator, American Memory, Library of Congress,
emphasized that he would attempt to represent the people who perform some
of the work of converting or preparing materials and that the core of
the Workshop had to do with preparation and production. FLEISCHHAUER
then drew a distinction between the long term, when many things would be
available and connected in the ways that GIFFORD described, and the short
term, in which AM not only has wrestled with the issue of what is the
best course to pursue but also has faced a variety of technical
challenges.
FLEISCHHAUER remarked AM's endeavors to deal with a wide range of library
formats, such as motion picture collections, sound-recording collections,
and pictorial collections of various sorts, especially collections of
photographs. In the course of these efforts, AM kept coming back to
textual materials--manuscripts or rare printed matter, bound materials,
etc. Text posed the greatest conversion challenge of all. Thus, the
genesis of the Workshop, which reflects the problems faced by AM. These
problems include physical problems. For example, those in the library
and archive business deal with collections made up of fragile and rare
manuscript items, bound materials, especially the notoriously brittle
bound materials of the late nineteenth century. These are precious
cultural artifacts, however, as well as interesting sources of
information, and LC desires to retain and conserve them. AM needs to
handle things without damaging them. Guillotining a book to run it
through a sheet feeder must be avoided at all costs.
Beyond physical problems, issues pertaining to quality arose. For
example, the desire to provide users with a searchable text is affected
by the question of acceptable level of accuracy. One hundred percent
accuracy is tremendously expensive. On the other hand, the output of
optical character recognition (OCR) can be tremendously inaccurate.
Although AM has attempted to find a middle ground, uncertainty persists
as to whether or not it has discovered the right solution.
Questions of quality arose concerning images as well. FLEISCHHAUER
contrasted the extremely high level of quality of the digital images in
the Cornell Xerox Project with AM's efforts to provide a browse-quality
or access-quality image, as opposed to an archival or preservation image.
FLEISCHHAUER therefore welcomed the opportunity to compare notes.
FLEISCHHAUER observed in passing that conversations he had had about
networks have begun to signal that for various forms of media a
determination may be made that there is a browse-quality item, or a
distribution-and-access-quality item that may coexist in some systems
with a higher quality archival item that would be inconvenient to send
through the network because of its size. FLEISCHHAUER referred, of
course, to images more than to searchable text.
As AM considered those questions, several conceptual issues arose: ought
AM occasionally to reproduce materials entirely through an image set, at
other times, entirely through a text set, and in some cases, a mix?
There probably would be times when the historical authenticity of an
artifact would require that its image be used. An image might be
desirable as a recourse for users if one could not provide 100-percent
accurate text. Again, AM wondered, as a practical matter, if a
distinction could be drawn between rare printed matter that might exist
in multiple collections--that is, in ten or fifteen libraries. In such
cases, the need for perfect reproduction would be less than for unique
items. Implicit in his remarks, FLEISCHHAUER conceded, was the admission
that AM has been tilting strongly towards quantity and drawing back a
little from perfect quality. That is, it seemed to AM that society would
be better served if more things were distributed by LC--even if they were
not quite perfect--than if fewer things, perfectly represented, were
distributed. This was stated as a proposition to be tested, with
responses to be gathered from users.
In thinking about issues related to reproduction of materials and seeing
other people engaged in parallel activities, AM deemed it useful to
convene a conference. Hence, the Workshop. FLEISCHHAUER thereupon
surveyed the several groups represented: 1) the world of images (image
users and image makers); 2) the world of text and scholarship and, within
this group, those concerned with language--FLEISCHHAUER confessed to finding
delightful irony in the fact that some of the most advanced thinkers on
computerized texts are those dealing with ancient Greek and Roman materials;
3) the network world; and 4) the general world of library science, which
includes people interested in preservation and cataloging.
FLEISCHHAUER concluded his remarks with special thanks to the David and
Lucile Packard Foundation for its support of the meeting, the American
Memory group, the Office for Scholarly Programs, the National
Demonstration Lab, and the Office of Special Events. He expressed the
hope that David Woodley Packard might be able to attend, noting that
Packard's work and the work of the foundation had sponsored a number of
projects in the text area.
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