LOC Workshop on Etexts | Page 4

The books returned to
the library shelves are high-quality and useful replacements on
acid-free paper that should last a long time. To date, the Cornell project
has placed little or no emphasis on creating searchable texts; one would
not be surprised to find that the project participants view such texts as
new editions, and thus not as faithful reproductions.
In her talk on preservation, Patricia BATTIN struck an ecumenical and
flexible note as she endorsed the creation and dissemination of a variety
of types of digital copies. Do not be too narrow in defining what counts
as a preservation element, BATTIN counseled; for the present, at least,
digital copies made with preservation in mind cannot be as narrowly
standardized as, say, microfilm copies with the same objective. Setting
standards precipitously can inhibit creativity, but delay can result in
chaos, she advised.
In part, BATTIN's position reflected the unsettled nature of
image-format standards, and attendees could hear echoes of this
unsettledness in the comments of various speakers. For example, Jean
BARONAS reviewed the status of several formal standards moving
through committees of experts; and Clifford LYNCH encouraged the
use of a new guideline for transmitting document images on Internet.
Testimony from participants in the National Agricultural Library's
(NAL) Text Digitization Program and LC's American Memory project
highlighted some of the challenges to the actual creation or interchange
of images, including difficulties in converting preservation microfilm
to digital form. Donald WATERS reported on the progress of a master
plan for a project at Yale University to convert books on microfilm to
digital image sets, Project Open Book (POB).
The Workshop offered rather less of an imaging practicum than
planned, but "how-to" hints emerge at various points, for example,
throughout KENNEY's presentation and in the discussion of arcana
such as thresholding and dithering offered by George THOMA and
FLEISCHHAUER.
NOTES: (3) Although there is a sense in which any reproductions of
historical materials preserve the human record, specialists in the field
have developed particular guidelines for the creation of acceptable
preservation copies.

(4) Titles and affiliations of presenters are given at the beginning of
their respective talks and in the Directory of Participants (Appendix
III).
THE MACHINE-READABLE TEXT: MARKUP AND USE
The sections of the Workshop that dealt with machine-readable text
tended to be more concerned with access and use than with
preservation, at least in the narrow technical sense. Michael
SPERBERG-McQUEEN made a forceful presentation on the Text
Encoding Initiative's (TEI) implementation of the Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML). His ideas were echoed by Susan
HOCKEY, Elli MYLONAS, and Stuart WEIBEL. While the
presentations made by the TEI advocates contained no practicum, their
discussion focused on the value of the finished product, what the
European Community calls reusability, but what may also be termed
durability. They argued that marking up--that is, coding--a text in a
well-conceived way will permit it to be moved from one computer
environment to another, as well as to be used by various users. Two
kinds of markup were distinguished: 1) procedural markup, which
describes the features of a text (e.g., dots on a page), and 2) descriptive
markup, which describes the structure or elements of a document (e.g.,
chapters, paragraphs, and front matter).
The TEI proponents emphasized the importance of texts to scholarship.
They explained how heavily coded (and thus analyzed and annotated)
texts can underlie research, play a role in scholarly communication, and
facilitate classroom teaching. SPERBERG-McQUEEN reminded
listeners that a written or printed item (e.g., a particular edition of a
book) is merely a representation of the abstraction we call a text. To
concern ourselves with faithfully reproducing a printed instance of the
text, SPERBERG-McQUEEN argued, is to concern ourselves with the
representation of a representation ("images as simulacra for the text").
The TEI proponents' interest in images tends to focus on corollary
materials for use in teaching, for example, photographs of the
Acropolis to accompany a Greek text.
By the end of the Workshop, SPERBERG-McQUEEN confessed to
having been converted to a limited extent to the view that electronic
images constitute a promising alternative to microfilming; indeed, an
alternative probably superior to microfilming. But he was not

convinced that electronic images constitute a serious attempt to
represent text in electronic form. HOCKEY and MYLONAS also
conceded that their experience at the Pierce Symposium the previous
week at Georgetown University and the present conference at the
Library of Congress had compelled them to reevaluate their perspective
on the usefulness of text as images. Attendees could see that the text
and image advocates were in constructive tension, so to say.
Three nonTEI presentations described approaches to preparing
machine-readable text that are less rigorous and thus less expensive. In
the case of the Papers of George Washington, Dorothy TWOHIG
explained that the digital version will provide a not-quite-perfect
rendering