"A library and apparatus of every kind": The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia

The Electronic Text Center at the Univesity of Virginia combines an online archive of thousands of SGML-encoded electronic texts, all available through a single piece of search software, with a library-based center housing hardware and software suitable for the creation and analysis of text. Throuigh ongoing training sessions and support of individual teaching and research projects, the Center is building a diverse and expanding user community locally, and providing a potential model for similar enterprises at other institutions. In August 1992, after almost a year of planning, the University of Virginia (UVa) Library opened its Electronic Text Center and online collection of full-text databases. Since then it has established itself locally as a catalyst for the development of an increaisngly sophisticated user community, and nationally as a model for the large-scale implementation of online texts in higher education. Underlying Principles Virginia's electronic text enterprise is founded on serveal underlying assumptions and expectations, which the first eighteen months of operation have tested and strenghtened. Principal among these are the notions that--whenever technically and legally possible--the electronic texts should be remotely accessible, encoded in a uniform, nonproprietary manner, and all online data should be delivered up through a single piece of search-and-display software. As have other libraries, the University of Virginia has seen the negative side of growing collection of e-texts on CD-ROMs: they are difficult to network on a campuswide scale, they are discrete items that cannot be intermingled in a large data set, and they typically come with their own search tools. The prospect of having to teach and support dozens of search packages, all doing much the same thing, was not a welcome thought. By buying the data on disk or tape and loading it into an online system that is under local control (and can therefore be tailored somewhat to local needs), the Center has largely avoided the logistical nightmare of working with electronic "books", each of which has its own access methods. Moreover, it was an assumption from the beginning that simply providing e-texts and related technologies was not enough: they had to be offered up in a manner appropriate to users whose needs are often sophisticated but whose technical expereince is often limited, as is their sense of the possibilities of computer-aided textual study. Therefore, these new pedagogical and research services had to be introduced and nurtured through ongoing training sesssions, orientations, demonstrations, and online help. The Center actively recruits new student and faculty users when there are holdings in their areas of study, and intorductory sessions are tailored to a particular course or seminar, focusing on, say, just the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century philosophy holdings or just the Middle English poetry and prose. The Center The Electronic Text Center is open and staffed most of the time that the library is open and provides a place where users can be introduced to the new services, where existing users can get regular help, where offline electronic texts and available, and where scanners and text-analysis software can be used. Having a walk-in centers is central to the ability to provide electronic text technologies to university partons: it is certainly possible to have an online text archive without a supporting center, or a library-based center with no online component, but the impact of these two items together not only has proven to be much greater than either one in isolation, but may be the only practical way to create a broad-based user community that sustains the growth of the service. The Electronic Text Center, therefore, is both a work space for the coordinator and a staff of graduate students, and a place for usres to learn how to create e-texts, to operate a range of related text-analysis software, and to access those e-texts not availble onlline, including the following: the works of Immanuel Kant; the Global Jewish Database; the ICAME langauge corpora; Perseus (a collection of Greek texts and images); CETEDOC, a database of Latin theological works; and a hypertext edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas. …