Library of Congress

“ This direct involvement in computing is changing the researcher's perspective on the nature of research itself, that is, the kinds of questions that can be posed, the analytical methodologies that can be used, the types and amount of sources that are appropriate for analyses, and the form in which findings are presented. The trend toward end-user computing means that, increasingly, electronic media and computation are being infused into all processes of humanities scholarship, inspiring remarkable transformations in scholarly communication. ”

“ The basic rule is if a copy is sold, all rights of distribution are extinguished with the sale of that copy. The key is that it must be sold. A number of companies overcome this obstacle by leasing or renting their product. These companies argue that if the material is rented or leased and not sold, they control the uses of a work. The fourth right, and one very important in a digital world, is a right of public performance, which means the right to show the work sequentially. For example, copyright owners control the showing of a CD-ROM product in a public place such as a public library. ”

“ Copyright ought to remain with the author, but as one moves forward globally in the electronic arena, a middleman who can handle the various rights becomes increasingly necessary.
The notion of copyright law is that it resides with the individual, but in an on-line environment, where a work can be adapted and tinkered with by many individuals, there is concern. If changes are authorized and there is no agreement to the contrary, the person who changes a work owns the changes. ”

“ CALALUCA expressed some minor doubts as to whether a data bank can be fully TEI-conformant. Every effort can be made, but in the end to be TEI-conformant means to accept the need to make some firm encoding decisions that can, indeed, be disputed. The TEI points the publisher in a proper direction but does not presume to make all the decisions for him or her. Essentially, the goal of encoding was to eliminate, as much as possible, the hindrances to information-networking, so that if an institution acquires a database, everybody associated with the institution can have access to it. ”

“ Libraries must anticipate the future implications of this technology, participate in its development, and deploy it to ensure access to the world's information resources.
The infrastructure for the information age is being put in place. Libraries face strategic decisions about their role in the development, deployment, and use of this infrastructure. The emerging infrastructure is much more than computers and communication lines. It is more than the ability to compute at a remote site, send electronic mail to a peer across the country, or move a file from one library to another. ”

“ By means of advanced technologies, computers can recognize patterns, analyze text, and model concepts. Furthermore, computers can complete these processes faster with more sources and with greater precision than scholars who must rely on manual interpretation of data. But if scholars are to use computers for these processes, source materials must be in a form amenable to computer-assisted analysis. For this reason many scholars, once they have identified the sources that are key to their research, are converting them to machine-readable form. ”

“ Other questions raised by FREEMAN concerned the electronic format itself. For instance, in a school environment it is often difficult both for teachers and students to gain a sense of what it is they are viewing. They understand that it is a visual image, but they do not necessarily know that it is a postcard from the turn of the century, a panoramic photograph, or even machine-readable text of an eighteenth-century broadside, a twentieth-century printed book, or a nineteenth-century diary. That distinction is often difficult for people in a school environment to grasp. ”

“ The preservation of electronic media requires a reconceptualizing of our preservation principles during a volatile, standardless transition which may last far longer than any of us envision today. BATTIN urged the necessity of shifting focus from assessing, measuring, and setting standards for the permanence of the medium to the concept of managing continuing access to information stored on a variety of media and requiring a variety of ever-changing hardware and software for access—a fundamental shift for the library profession. ”

“ If a provision of the contract, grant, or regulation states that there will be no copyright, then it does not exist. When a work is created, copyright automatically comes into existence unless something exists that says it does not. ”

“ Moreover, if a work is protected by copyright in the United States, one generally needs the permission of the copyright owner to convert it. Normally, who will own the new—that is, converted- -material is a matter of contract. In the absence of a contract, the person who creates the new material is the author and owner. But people do not generally think about the copyright implications until after the fact. PETERS stressed the need when dealing with copyrighted works to think about copyright in advance. One's bargaining power is much greater up front than it is down the road. ”

“ There is no effort to define how one teaches a topic using Perseus, although the project may eventually collect papers by people who have used it to teach. Rather, Perseus aims to provide primary material in a kind of electronic library, an electronic sandbox, so to say, in which students and scholars who are working on this material can explore by themselves. With that, MYLONAS demonstrated Perseus, beginning with the Perseus gateway, the first thing one sees upon opening Perseus—an effort in part to solve the contextualizing problem—which tells the user what the system contains. ”

“ But the truth of the world, and it is not a great truth, is that the big guy gets played on the radio more frequently than the little guy, who has to do much more until he becomes a big guy. That is true of every author, every composer, everyone, and, unfortunately, is part of life.
Copyright always originates with the author, except in cases of works made for hire. (Most software falls into this category.) When an author sends his article to a journal, he has not relinquished copyright, though he retains the right to relinquish it. The author receives absolutely everything. ”

“ Stuart WEIBEL, senior research scientist, Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) , described OCLC's approach to preparing electronic text. He argued that the electronic world into which we are moving must accommodate not only the future but the past as well, and to some degree even the present. Thus, starting out at one end with retroconversion and keying of texts, one would like to move toward much more automated ways of developing data. ”

“ One library reports that a family is using AM to help educate their children. In another instance, individuals from a local museum came in to use AM to prepare an exhibit on toys of the past. These two examples emphasize the mission of the public library as a cultural institution, reaching out to people who do not have the same resources available to those who live in a metropolitan area or have access to a major library. One rural library reports that junior high school students in large numbers came in one afternoon to use AM for entertainment. ”

“ However, as BROWNRIGG discovered between 1987 and 1989 in Australia, if one wants access to the Internet but cannot afford it or has some physical boundary that prevents her or him from gaining access, it can be extremely frustrating. He suggested that because of economics and physical barriers we were beginning to create a world of haves and have-nots in the process of scholarly communication, even in the United States. ”

“ The problem with a real networked environment is that one does not know who is reformatting and reprocessing one's data when one enters a client server mode. It becomes anybody's guess, for example, if the network uses a Z39.50 server, or what clients are doing with one's data. A data provider can say that his contract will only permit clients to have access to his data after he vets them and their presentation and makes certain it suits him. ”

“ FREEMAN conceded the correctness of GREENFIELD's observation as applied to a school environment. The risk is that a student would sit down at a system, play with it, find some things of interest, and then walk away. But in the relatively controlled situation of a school library, much will depend on the instructions a teacher or a librarian gives a student. She viewed the situation not as one of fine-tuning research skills but of involving students at a personal level in understanding and researching things. ”

“ Standards are essential to facilitate interconnectivity and access, but, BATTIN said, as LYNCH pointed out yesterday, if set too soon they can hinder creativity, expansion of capability, and the broadening of access. The characteristics of standards for digital imagery differ radically from those for analog imagery. And the nature of digital technology implies continuing volatility and change. To reiterate, precipitous standard-setting can inhibit creativity, but delayed standard-setting results in chaos. ”

“ Judith ZIDAR, coordinator, National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program (NATDP) , National Agricultural Library (NAL) , offered several answers to the question of why one attempts to perform full-text conversion: 1) Text in an image can be read by a human but not by a computer, so of course it is not searchable and there is not much one can do with it. 2) Some material simply requires word-level access. For instance, the legal profession insists on full-text access to its material; with taxonomic or geographic material, which entails numerous names, one virtually requires word-level access. ”

“ The Yale Library designed Project Open Book on the assumption that microfilm is more than adequate as a medium for preserving the content of deteriorated library materials. As planning in the project has advanced, it is increasingly clear that the challenge of digital image technology and the key to the success of efforts like Project Open Book is to provide a means of both preserving and improving access to those deteriorated materials. ”

“ Since this is a transitional medium, why even bother to create software to run on a CD-ROM? Since everybody knows people will be networking information, why go to the trouble—which is far greater with CD-ROM than with the production of magnetic data? Finally, how does one make the data available? Can many of the hurdles to using electronic information that some publishers have imposed upon databases be eliminated?
The PLD project was based on the principle that computer-searching of texts is most effective when it is done with a large database. ”

“ The Workshop was also valuable to attendees—including those involved with American Memory—who came less committed to particular approaches or concepts. These attendees learned a great deal, and plan to select and employ elements of imaging, text-coding, and networked distribution that suit their respective projects and purposes.
Still, reality rears its ugly head: no breakthrough has been achieved. On the imaging side, one confronts a proliferation of competing data-interchange standards and a lack of consensus on the role of digital facsimiles in preservation. ”

“ The second right, which is critical to conversion, is the right to change a work. The right to make new versions is perhaps one of the most significant rights of authors, particularly in an electronic world. The third right is the right to publish the work and the right to disseminate it, something that everyone who deals in an electronic medium needs to know. ”

“ The Perseus Project, a database that provides a multimedia curriculum on classical Greek civilization, is a good example of the way in which entire curricula are being recast using information technologies. It is anticipated that the current difficulty in exchanging electronically computer-based instructional software, which in turn makes it difficult for one scholar to build upon the work of others, will be resolved before too long. ”

“ BATTIN argued that standards are a double-edged sword for those concerned with the preservation of the human record, that is, the provision of access to recorded knowledge in a multitude of media as far into the future as possible. ”

“ End-user computing means that the person touching the keyboard, or performing computations, is the same as the person who initiates or consumes the computation. The emergence of personal computers, along with a host of other forces, such as ubiquitous computing, advances in interface design, and the on-line transition, is prompting the consumers of computation to do their own computing, and is thus rendering obsolete the traditional distinction between end users and ultimate users. ”

“ In addition to ignorance of new technical advances, I have found that too many editors—and historians and literary scholars—are resistant and even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their work. ”

“ Text posed the greatest conversion challenge of all. Thus, the genesis of the Workshop, which reflects the problems faced by AM. These problems include physical problems. For example, those in the library and archive business deal with collections made up of fragile and rare manuscript items, bound materials, especially the notoriously brittle bound materials of the late nineteenth century. These are precious cultural artifacts, however, as well as interesting sources of information, and LC desires to retain and conserve them. AM needs to handle things without damaging them. ”

“ How one can think about working with image material to begin with, but structuring it and digitizing it in such a way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and find a common way of building text and images together so that they can be used jointly in the future, with the network support to begin there because that is how people will want to access it. ”

“ Internet now carries more than 700 conferences, with about 80 percent of these devoted to topics in the social sciences and the humanities. Other scholars use on-line networks for "distance learning." Meanwhile, there has been a tremendous growth in end-user computing; professors today are less likely than their predecessors to ask the campus computer center to process their data. Electronic texts are one key to these sophisticated applications, MICHELSON reported, and more and more scholars in the humanities now work in an on-line environment. ”

“ The question of how people will tag the text is in large part a function of their reaction to what SPERBERG-McQUEEN termed the issue of reproducibility. What one needs to be able to reproduce are the things one wants to work with. Perhaps a more useful concept than that of reproducibility or recoverability is that of processability, that is, what can one get from an electronic text without reading it again in the original. ”

“ A digital image can be manipulated in a number of ways to improve image capture; for example, Xerox has developed a windowing application that enables one to capture a page containing both text and illustrations in a manner that optimizes the reproduction of both. (With light-lens technology, one must choose which to optimize, text or the illustration; in preservation microfilming, the current practice is to shoot an illustrated page twice, once to highlight the text and the second time to provide the best capture for the illustration.) ”

“ If one purchases a computer software package, such as MacPaint, and creates something new, one receives protection only for that which has been added.
PETERS added that often in copyright matters, rough justice is the outcome, for example, in collective licensing, ASCAP (i.e., American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) , and BMI (i.e., Broadcast Music, Inc.) , where it may seem that the big guys receive more than their due. Of course, people ought not to copy a creative product without paying for it; there should be some compensation. ”

“ Thus, clearinghouses and other collectives comprise one option that has succeeded in providing for use of a work. Often overlooked when one begins to use copyrighted material and put products together is how expensive the permissions process and managing it is. According to PETERS, the price of copyright in a digital medium, whatever solution is worked out, will include managing and assembling the database. She strongly recommended that publishers and librarians or people with various backgrounds cooperate to work out administratively feasible systems, in order to produce better results. ”