Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

David Seaman

Alderman Library, University of Virginia

As part of an ongoing commitment to the use of computers in education and research, the University of Virginia Library has established an Electronic Text Center and an on-line collection of machine-readable texts. The initial set of on-line texts includes the following: new Oxford English Dictionary; the entire corpus of Old English writings; selected Library of America titles; several versions of Shakespeare's complete works; hundreds of other literary, social, historical, philosophical, and political materials in various languages (chiefly from the Oxford and the Cambridge Text Archives); and the currently released parts of two massive databases from Chadwyck-Healey: J-P. Migne's Patrologia Latina, and the English Poetry Full-Text Database, comprised of the complete works of 1,350 English poets from AD 600 to 1900. Because of contractual obligations, access to these texts and searching tools is restricted to University of Virginia students, faculty and staff.

A principal aim of the Electronic Text Center is to help create a new broad-based user community within the humanities at Virginia. We work daily with individual users to introduce them to new working methods, new teaching possibilities, and new types of equipment, and we aid John Price-Wilkin, the library's Information Management Coordinator, to run regular training sessions for the on-line data and search tools. The Library was adamant from the earliest stages of this enterprise that these new services had to be introduced and taught through ongoing workshops and demonstrations, in order to become a mainstream part of the teaching and research resources on which our faculty and students draw. New users need to see for themselves that they can sit at a large color monitor and simultaneously search multiple on-line databases (say, the Oxford English Dictionary and the English Poetry database) while manipulating color images of manuscript pages (which they may have just created in the Center), and then can open another window to e-mail a colleague about the results, or to log into another library's catalog before using our on-line document delivery service to order a book through Inter-Library Loan. Such hands-on demonstrations typically overcome any initial trepidation new users may feel.

Our on-line texts are all SGML encoded. Some of these we are tagging ourselves, with the aid of volunteers from various library departments, under a Staff Sharing program for cross-training. The on-line texts are searched using Pat, a program developed initially for the Oxford English Dictionary. Users in the Library and elsewhere on campus with access to a machine running X Windows can search and view these databases through a graphical interface to Pat that shows texts in a form very close to the appearance of the printed page; users dialing in from desktop machines will typically use a VT100 search and display front-end to Pat (called Patty), which the Library is developing in conjunction with UVa.'s Academic Computing Department.

Having the majority of our electronic texts available on-line affords significant advantages: it eases the pressure of use on the Center, gives much more flexible and convenient access to our users, and allows us to provide the same search and display "front-end" for all our collections. Having been taught to use one database, a user has the knowledge necessary to search all current and future databases, thereby overcoming the frustrations often involved with using CD-ROM products, each of which has a different interface.

In addition to building the on-line collection, the Electronic Text Center both provides a place in which to use those few texts not available on-line and also houses hardware and software that allows the computerized analysis of text. At present we have MS-DOS machines, a NeXT, and an IBM RS6000, all with large color monitors; scanners that turn printed text into computer-readable forms and that generate high-resolution color images; and laser printers and CD-ROM drives. These tools allow scholars to use software that can generate indices, concordances, word-lists, and statistical analyses (Micro-OCP, Tact, MTAS, and LitStats), create hypertexts (Guide), and perform collations and cumulative sum analysis. We use "xv", an X Windows image viewer, for viewing, cropping, and enlarging digital images alongside the searchable databases. The Center's NeXT also gives us the capacity to record digital sound.

Our first semester of operation has necessarily been a time of experiment and fine-tuning; nonetheless, there have been significant research and teaching projects using the services of the Center and the on-line texts throughout the fall:

• A large undergraduate survey course used our holdings in the 19th century novel and added an 18th century Canadian novel to the collection.

• Scholars have searched the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and several hundred books of rabbinical responsa on the Taklit-Shoot CD-ROM.

• A Shakespeare survey course created a teaching tool using text, images, and digitized sound from different productions of The Merchant of Venice, to run alongside the on-line collections of Shakespeare's works.

• A graduate student has studied ship-naming conventions and metaphor in Anglo-Saxon writings, using the Old English Corpus.

• A composition class used our services to gather and search position papers from the Bush/Clinton campaigns.

• A French professor has set up a language tutorial program for his medieval French course.

• Bibliography students have used collating software, image scanning, and digitized sound while preparing and presenting research projects for a graduate textual editing course.

• A Medievalist has scanned in manuscripts, using the ability to enlarge and re-color portions of a scanned image as he transcribes them.

In addition, the first two Fellows of the University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities have entered text and images for a hypermedia edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and have scanned in maps, engravings, census data, and texts for a major research project on two Civil War communities (one Northern and one Southern). In the course of all this activity, the E-Text Center staff have given impromptu and formal training sessions to hundreds of faculty, students, and visitors.

The Center and on-line archive provide a potential model for other institutions as they plan similar endeavors. We hope that the strong partnership we have forged with our local academic computing community will also provide an example of how to create an "information technology community" at the college level by unifying the creative energy and expertise of technical and non-technical departments. As part of this University-wide initiative to foster lasting links between academic computing and the humanities, we now have members of the Academic Computing faculty in Alderman Library staffing the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

The Electronic Text Center, located on the third floor of Alderman Library, is open Monday-Thursday 9am-10pm, Friday 9am-6pm, and Sunday 1pm-10pm, and is staffed by David Seaman (coordinator), Peter Byrnes, David Gants, Peter Kastor, Jamie Spriggs, and Kelly Tetterton. To contact us, please send email to etext@virginia.edu, or phone: 804-924-3230, or fax 804-924-1431.