LOC Workshop on Etexts | Page 7

possibility of multiple
institutions digitizing the same work.
CONCLUSION
The Workshop was valuable because it brought together partisans from
various groups and provided an occasion to compare goals and methods.
The more committed partisans frequently communicate with others in
their groups, but less often across group boundaries. 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. In the realm of machine-readable texts, one
encounters a reasonably mature standard but methodological
difficulties and high costs. These latter problems, of course, represent a
special impediment to the desire, as it is sometimes expressed in the
popular press, "to put the [contents of the] Library of Congress on
line." In the words of one participant, there was "no solution to the
economic problems--the projects that are out there are surviving, but it
is going to be a lot of work to transform the information industry, and
so far the investment to do that is not forthcoming" (LESK, per
litteras).
*** *** *** ****** *** *** ***
PROCEEDINGS
WELCOME
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++ GIFFORD * Origin of Workshop in
current Librarian's desire to make LC's collections more widely
available * Desiderata arising from the prospect of greater
interconnectedness *
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++
After welcoming participants on behalf of the Library of Congress,
American Memory (AM), and the National Demonstration Lab, Prosser
GIFFORD, director for scholarly programs, Library of Congress,
located the origin of the Workshop on Electronic Texts in a
conversation he had had considerably more than a year ago with Carl
FLEISCHHAUER concerning some of the issues faced by AM. On the
assumption that numerous other people were asking the same questions,
the decision was made to bring together as many of these people as
possible to ask the same questions together. In a deeper sense,
GIFFORD said, the origin of the Workshop lay in the desire of the
current Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, to make the
collections of the Library, especially those offering unique or unusual
testimony on aspects of the American experience, available to a much

wider circle of users than those few people who can come to
Washington to use them. This meant that the emphasis of AM, from the
outset, has been on archival collections of the basic material, and on
making these collections themselves available, rather than selected or
heavily edited products.
From AM's emphasis followed the questions with which the Workshop
began: who will use these materials, and in what form will they wish to
use them. But an even larger issue deserving mention, in GIFFORD's
view, was the phenomenal growth in Internet connectivity. He
expressed the hope that the prospect of greater interconnectedness than
ever before would lead to: 1) much more cooperative and mutually
supportive endeavors; 2) development of systems of shared and
distributed responsibilities to avoid duplication and to ensure accuracy
and preservation of unique materials; and 3) agreement on the
necessary standards and development of the appropriate directories and
indices to make navigation straightforward among the varied resources
that are, and increasingly will be, available. In this connection,
GIFFORD requested that participants reflect from the outset upon the
sorts of outcomes they thought the Workshop might have. Did those
present constitute a group with sufficient common interests to propose
a next step or next steps, and if so, what might those be? They would
return to these questions the following afternoon.
******
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++ FLEISCHHAUER * Core of Workshop
concerns preparation and production of materials * Special challenge in
conversion of textual materials * Quality versus quantity * Do the
several groups represented share common interests? *
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++
Carl FLEISCHHAUER, coordinator, American Memory, Library of
Congress, emphasized that he would attempt to represent the people
who perform some of the work of converting or preparing materials and
that the core of the Workshop had to do with preparation and
production. FLEISCHHAUER then drew a distinction between the
long term, when many things would be available and connected in the
ways that GIFFORD described, and the short term, in which AM not

only has wrestled with the issue of what is the best course to pursue but
also has faced a variety of technical challenges.
FLEISCHHAUER remarked AM's endeavors to deal with a wide range
of library formats, such as motion picture collections, sound-recording
collections, and pictorial collections of various sorts, especially
collections of photographs. In the course of these efforts, AM kept
coming back to textual materials--manuscripts