University Of California At Berkeley Teams Up With Leading Hardware And Software Vendors To Define The Digital Library Of The Future; Gifts from Electronic Book Technologies and Sun Microsystems Enable Berkeley Library To Publish Scholarly Materials On The Internet

Business Wire, Jan 31, 1996

BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 31, 1996--The University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) Library and Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. (EBT) today announced the availability of a large collection of digital library material through the Internet. This announcement marks an important event in the development of an SGML-based archival access system with which the digital archives of the future may publish their contents directly on the Internet.

Since 1993, the UC Berkeley Library has been conducting a series of research and demonstration projects based upon Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an ISO standard for electronic publishing, in order to develop the means to electronically publish large collections of primary source materials including text, photographs, manuscripts, maps and music scores from a wide variety of scholarly works on the Internet. These projects grew out of the Library's recognition that archival finding aids - documents which have traditionally been used in libraries, museums and archives to provide intellectual control and access to archival collections - rendered in a standard, platform- independent electronic form, would add a key layer of access and control in the complex environment of the Internet.

In the Berkeley Finding Aid Project, a team of Berkeley Library researchers led by Daniel Pitti developed a prototype encoding standard for finding aids in the form of an SGML Document Type Definition (DTD). Using this DTD, the team encoded a number of finding aids for collections held at important research libraries throughout the United States. The resulting SGML finding aids are themselves electronic publications of great interest to researchers but, by exploiting SGML's capability to create hyperlinks to other digital data, the Berkeley team turned the electronic finding aids into vehicles for the electronic publication of the contents of the archival collections they describe. They achieved this by linking digital images of the primary source materials, produced through scanning, to their finding aids.

This seminal work has already gained a wide following in the archival and library communities. With the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), Council on Library Resources, and the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program, rapidly moving to complete the standards process initiated in Berkeley, the Berkeley Finding Aid Project is generally considered to have achieved its primary goal of driving the development of a new standard for electronic finding aids, and, in doing so, to have defined the state of the art in archival electronic publishing.

EBT, Inc. (http://www.ebt.com) has been an important partner in this effort from the beginning. Early on the Berkeley team selected EBT's DynaText(R) SGML-based publishing system for browsing and online presentation of their SGML finding aids, because their research revealed that it was the best available software for online presentation of SGML-based documents. As a result of the relationship that developed between EBT and the Berkeley Finding Aid Project, the Library became the first recipient of EBT's Educational Grant Program to support research into next-generation, open, standards-based publishing of digital information on the Internet. The Educational Grant Program is designed to advance the tools and practices available to publishers for utilizing vendor-, platform-, and application-independent online publishing models. Additionally, EBT's Educational Grant Program aims to garner further support by expanding the use of SGML in the educational community, enabling institutions to be more effective and competitive.

"EBT's contribution to the development of a finding aid encoding standard has gone beyond the software grant," said Daniel Pitti, leader of the finding aid encoding standard development effort at UC Berkeley. "Steve DeRose, Senior System Architect at EBT, has participated in two development meetings, one at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, and one at the Library of Congress National Digital Library. Speaking on behalf of my fellow archivists, we are most grateful for his making his considerable expertise in SGML available to us. Without his help, we would not have been able to make the rapid progress that we have," continued Pitti.

The collection of finding aids and primary source materials produced in the Berkeley Finding Aid Project have now been selected for electronic publication on the UC Berkeley Library SunSITE. They include finding aids from UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library and from collaborating institutions such as Duke University, the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC San Diego, and many other important libraries and archives. It is possible to make these SGML documents and their accompanying digital images available on the Internet because of another EBT product, DynaWeb(tm), a high-function SGML World-Wide Web server, which provides scholars with powerful capabilities to browse and search the finding aids on the Internet. Internet users can view the collection through the World Wide Web at the address http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:8008. A scholar can view descriptions of archival collections and individual materials and can click on a thumbnail to view high resolution versions of connected images.