Terry Butler, Improving Access to Encoded Primary Texts, a draft presentation for the upcoming ACH/ALLC Conference 2005 (Victoria, June 15-18, 2005). Excerpt: 'An impressive amount of our literary heritage has now been put into digital editions. Much of it is encoded in XML, often using recognized standards for encoding such as the TEI. One of the primary scholarly goals behind this activity has been to increase access to the texts - by publishing them on-line, and by making the text amenable to searching. The XML tagging provides further added value for searching and display. Metadata, where it exists at all, is mostly at the collection level, or provides only a broad guide to the contents of a specific work. Between high-level metadata access, and a direct search on the word forms of the text, there is little help for the reader. Due to the immense labour involved in creating detailed subject indexing, very few scholarly electronic texts have indexes or finding aids which would draw the reader to specific sections of the work. To address this deficiency, a first trial has been made at automatic indexing of a substantial non-fiction work [Coleridge's Notebooks]....The overall goals for the project include: [1] creating an accurate electronic text of the entire notebook corpus; [2] creating an index and thesaurus for the notebooks which will be a start to a synthetic index to Coleridge's thought; [3] providing a web-based search and discovery system which will meet the needs of scholars, making his thought on a vast variety of topics more accessible.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/18/2005 05:34:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
