LOC Workshop on Etexts | Page 4

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 of the transcribed text--some 135,000 documents, available for research during the decades while the perfect or print version is completed. Members of the American Memory team and the staff of NAL's Text Digitization Program (see below) also outlined a middle ground concerning searchable texts. In the case of American Memory, contractors produce texts with about 99-percent accuracy that serve as "browse" or "reference" versions of written or printed originals. End users who need faithful copies or perfect renditions must refer to accompanying sets of digital facsimile images or consult copies of the