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

Library Trends, Spring, 1994 by Susan Hockey

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The remaining 5 percent of texts are what can be called packaged products, where the text has been indexed for use with specific, of ten proprietary, software and cannot be used for any other purpose. Most of these products, at present, are on CD-ROM (e.g., the CETEDOC library of Christian Latin Texts, the WordCruncher Disc of American and English literature, the New Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, and the Global Jewish Database). Libraries which provide these packaged resources will generally find that the support costs are not insignificant. Almost all use their own query language which in most cases is not intuitive. It takes some time to gain a good understanding of the full potential of many of them. They provide complex search facilities because the texts themselves are complex and scholars want to study them in many different ways. However, most of these products do have manuals which document the source of the text as well as how to use the programs, which is more than can be said for some texts.

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The Internet gives access to ARTFL and to the Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP), which includes the text of The Divine Comedy and major commentaries. ARTFL uses software developed by its own team, the second version of which is based on UNIX utilities and is not particularly easy to use for those not familiar with UNIX. The DDP uses BRS-Search with a user-friendly interface. It can perform flexible searches, but scholars who use it extensively will begin to see the limitations of applying a commercial text-retrieval system, which is document-oriented, to complex humanities texts, where it is not clear what constitutes a single document.

At present, it is rare for several different electronic versions of a work to exist. The Bible and Shakespeare are the exceptions. Comparisons of these can help in establishing design principles for better electronic texts. Bolton (1990) reviews three electronic versions of Shakespeare and tools to access them and gives a detailed evaluation from the perspective of a scholar in English studies. This essay highlights the relevance of complex tools for what are complex texts and the need to provide good documentation for them. Most of the current electronic versions of the Bible seem to be intended more for the popular market and only one or two would be really suitable for scholars and students in religious studies. As yet, there are few comparative reviews similar to Bolton's, but soon there will be more versions of electronic texts to choose from and more evaluations are sorely needed. Likely candidates might include a comparison of the texts of J. P. Migne's Patrologia Latina published by Chadwyck-Healey.

Given the present situation, how can a library evaluate electronic texts now? What makes a good electronic text that a research library would want to acquire or access? The popular market for electronic texts is growing fast. We are already witnessing different collections of electronic texts which are intended for popular, rather than scholarly, consumption. How can a research library ensure that a text is suitable for its collection? What do libraries need to know to make decisions on what to collect and how to provide access to their collections?

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

Library Trends, Spring, 1994 by Susan Hockey

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