LOC Workshop on Etexts, Library of Congress [books to read in a lifetime TXT] 📗

another positive outcome—a high level of personal involvement of

students with the materials in this system and greater motivation to

conduct their own research and draw their own conclusions.

* Perhaps the most ironic strength of these kinds of archival

electronic resources is that many of the teachers AM interviewed

were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary

materials but for unstructured primary materials. These would, they

thought, foster personally motivated research, exploration, and

excitement in their students. Indeed, these materials have done

just that. Ironically, however, this lack of structure produces

some of the confusion to which the newness of these kinds of

resources may also contribute. The key to effective use of archival

products in a school environment is a clear, effective introduction

to the system and to what it contains.

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DISCUSSION Nothing known, quantitatively, about the number of humanities scholars who must see the original versus those who would settle for an edited transcript, or about the ways in which humanities scholars are using information technology Firm conclusions concerning the manner and extent of the use of supporting materials in print provided by AM to await completion of evaluative study A listener’s reflections on additional applications of electronic texts Role of electronic resources in teaching elementary research skills to students *

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During the discussion that followed the presentations by MICHELSON, VECCIA, and FREEMAN, additional points emerged.

LESK asked if MICHELSON could give any quantitative estimate of the number of humanities scholars who must see or want to see the original, or the best possible version of the material, versus those who typically would settle for an edited transcript. While unable to provide a figure, she offered her impressions as an archivist who has done some reference work and has discussed this issue with other archivists who perform reference, that those who use archives and those who use primary sources for what would be considered very high-level scholarly research, as opposed to, say, undergraduate papers, were few in number, especially given the public interest in using primary sources to conduct genealogical or avocational research and the kind of professional research done by people in private industry or the federal government. More important in MICHELSON’s view was that, quantitatively, nothing is known about the ways in which, for example, humanities scholars are using information technology. No studies exist to offer guidance in creating strategies. The most recent study was conducted in 1985 by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and what it showed was that 50 percent of humanities scholars at that time were using computers. That constitutes the extent of our knowledge.

Concerning AM’s strategy for orienting people toward the scope of electronic resources, FREEMAN could offer no hard conclusions at this point, because she and her colleagues were still waiting to see, particularly in the schools, what has been made of their efforts. Within the system, however, AM has provided what are called electronic exhibits- -such as introductions to time periods and materials—and these are intended to offer a student user a sense of what a broadside is and what it might tell her or him. But FREEMAN conceded that the project staff would have to talk with students next year, after teachers have had a summer to use the materials, and attempt to discover what the students were learning from the materials. In addition, FREEMAN described supporting materials in print provided by AM at the request of local teachers during a meeting held at LC. These included time lines, bibliographies, and other materials that could be reproduced on a photocopier in a classroom. Teachers could walk away with and use these, and in this way gain a better understanding of the contents. But again, reaching firm conclusions concerning the manner and extent of their use would have to wait until next year.

As to the changes she saw occurring at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as a result of the increasing emphasis on technology in scholarly research, MICHELSON stated that NARA at this point was absorbing the report by her and Jeff Rothenberg addressing strategies for the archival profession in general, although not for the National Archives specifically. NARA is just beginning to establish its role and what it can do. In terms of changes and initiatives that NARA can take, no clear response could be given at this time.

GREENFIELD remarked two trends mentioned in the session. Reflecting on DALY’s opening comments on how he could have used a Latin collection of text in an electronic form, he said that at first he thought most scholars would be unwilling to do that. But as he thought of that in terms of the original meaning of research—that is, having already mastered these texts, researching them for critical and comparative purposes—for the first time, the electronic format made a lot of sense. GREENFIELD could envision growing numbers of scholars learning the new technologies for that very aspect of their scholarship and for convenience’s sake.

Listening to VECCIA and FREEMAN, GREENFIELD thought of an additional application of electronic texts. He realized that AM could be used as a guide to lead someone to original sources. Students cannot be expected to have mastered these sources, things they have never known about before. Thus, AM is leading them, in theory, to a vast body of information and giving them a superficial overview of it, enabling them to select parts of it. GREENFIELD asked if any evidence exists that this resource will indeed teach the new user, the K-12 students, how to do research. Scholars already know how to do research and are applying these new tools. But he wondered why students would go beyond picking out things that were most exciting to them.

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. Given the guidance one can receive at school, it then becomes possible to teach elementary research skills to students, which in fact one particular librarian said she was teaching her fifth graders. FREEMAN concluded that introducing the idea of following one’s own path of inquiry, which is essentially what research entails, involves more than teaching specific skills. To these comments VECCIA added the observation that the individual teacher and the use of a creative resource, rather than AM itself, seemed to make the key difference. Some schools and some teachers are making excellent use of the nature of critical thinking and teaching skills, she said.

Concurring with these remarks, DALY closed the session with the thought that the more that producers produced for teachers and for scholars to use with their students, the more successful their electronic products would prove.

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SESSION II. SHOW AND TELL

Jacqueline HESS, director, National Demonstration Laboratory, served as moderator of the “show-and-tell” session. She noted that a question-and-answer period would follow each presentation.

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MYLONAS Overview and content of Perseus Perseus’ primary materials exist in a system-independent, archival form A concession Textual aspects of Perseus Tools to use with the Greek text Prepared indices and full-text searches in Perseus English-Greek word search leads to close study of words and concepts Navigating Perseus by tracing down indices Using the iconography to perform research

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Elli MYLONAS, managing editor, Perseus Project, Harvard University, first gave an overview of Perseus, a large, collaborative effort based at Harvard University but with contributors and collaborators located at numerous universities and colleges in the United States (e.g., Bowdoin, Maryland, Pomona, Chicago, Virginia). Funded primarily by the Annenberg/CPB Project, with additional funding from Apple, Harvard, and the Packard Humanities Institute, among others, Perseus is a multimedia, hypertextual database for teaching and research on classical Greek civilization, which was released in February 1992 in version 1.0 and distributed by Yale University Press.

Consisting entirely of primary materials, Perseus includes ancient Greek texts and translations of those texts; catalog entries—that is, museum catalog entries, not library catalog entries—on vases, sites, coins, sculpture, and archaeological objects; maps; and a dictionary, among other sources. The number of objects and the objects for which catalog entries exist are accompanied by thousands of color images, which constitute a major feature of the database. Perseus contains approximately 30 megabytes of text, an amount that will double in subsequent versions. In addition to these primary materials, the Perseus Project has been building tools for using them, making access and navigation easier, the goal being to build part of the electronic environment discussed earlier in the morning in which students or scholars can work with their sources.

The demonstration of Perseus will show only a fraction of the real work that has gone into it, because the project had to face the dilemma of what to enter when putting something into machine-readable form: should one aim for very high quality or make concessions in order to get the material in? Since Perseus decided to opt for very high quality, all of its primary materials exist in a system-independent—insofar as it is possible to be system-independent—archival form. Deciding what that archival form would be and attaining it required much work and thought. For example, all the texts are marked up in SGML, which will be made compatible with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) when they are issued.

Drawings are postscript files, not meeting international standards, but at least designed to go across platforms. Images, or rather the real archival forms, consist of the best available slides, which are being digitized. Much of the catalog material exists in database form—a form that the average user could use, manipulate, and display on a personal computer, but only at great cost. Thus, this is where the concession comes in: All of this rich, well-marked-up information is stripped of much of its content; the images are converted into bit-maps and the text into small formatted chunks. All this information can then be imported into HyperCard and run on a mid-range Macintosh, which is what Perseus users have. This fact has made it possible for Perseus to attain wide use fairly rapidly. Without those archival forms the HyperCard version being demonstrated could not be made easily, and the project could not have the potential to move to other forms and machines and software as they appear, none of which information is in Perseus on the CD.

Of the numerous multimedia aspects of Perseus, MYLONAS focused on the textual. Part of what makes Perseus such a pleasure to use, MYLONAS said, is this effort at seamless integration and the ability to move around both visual and textual material. Perseus also made the decision not to attempt to interpret its material any more than one interprets by selecting. But, MYLONAS emphasized, Perseus is not courseware: No syllabus exists. 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.

MYLONAS demonstrated only a very small portion, beginning with primary texts and running off the CD-ROM. Having selected Aeschylus’