Evaluating electronic texts in the humanities - Libraries and the Internet: Education, Practice & Policy

Traditional humanities computing software, such as Micro-OCP and TACT, leaves these decisions entirely in the hands of the scholar. He or she has specific areas of research and can work with that in mind, but as more people want to work on the same texts, it makes sense not to duplicate effort and to provide these centrally. Libraries are now beginning to index texts for many different people to use, most notably with the PAT software, a retrieval program developed by Open Text Systems of Waterloo, Canada. In effect, in some ways, they are taking on responsibility for the intellectual content of the text since they have to decide what is indexed and how it can be accessed. The Text Encoding Initiative has laid the groundwork for multipurpose text after over four years of research. It is debatable whether existing software provides the capability of building indexes which can satisfy many different purposes. A good deal more research may be needed in this area, particularly in the exploitation of SGML.

CONCLUSION

What can a library do now? Setting up an electronic text center with adequate support is a considerable investment. The greater part of the cost will involve staff who support the facility. Ensuring that staff have adequate training in the relevant tools and techniques is essential so that they can make informed judgments. Discussion groups, such as <etextctr[at]rutvml>, are intended to help librarians enter this new world. Consultation with potential users is important at all stages. Experimenting with some CD-ROM-based resources would be a good first step as well as looking at some widely available software tools. These should help libraries decide how to handle texts over the network which is so obviously the long-term future. More than anything, widespread consultation and collaboration in research will be needed in order to determine the principles and procedures for providing accesss to the multipurpose high-quality electronic text which will serve the needs of humanities scholarship in the next century.

REFERENCES