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This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries]On: 15 November 2014, At: 02:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
The Serials Librarian: From thePrinted Page to the Digital AgePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20
The Future of DigitizedMaterialsDavid Seaman a & October Ivinsa Digital Library FoundationPublished online: 22 Sep 2008.
To cite this article: David Seaman & October Ivins (2003) The Future of DigitizedMaterials, The Serials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 44:1-2,45-49, DOI: 10.1300/J123v44n01_06
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The Future of Digitized Materials:Where We Have Been
and Where We’re Going
David Seaman
Presenter
October Ivins
Recorder
After ten years as the founding director of the E Text Center, DavidSeaman is leaving at the end of July to become the new director of theDigital Library Federation. At the close of the conference on Sundaymorning, NASIG attendees were treated to his retrospective and pro-spective insights about the center’s work in a delightfully witty and en-tertaining presentation. In his introduction, Seaman paraphrased thetitle of his talk, indicating that he would discuss the future of electronicpublishing, or where e-publishing (including serials) is going from afull-text perspective.
The E Text Center at the University of Virginia (UVa) deals exclu-sively in humanities and social sciences texts and images, with a focuson owning rather than licensing content. When the center started in theearly 1990s, they had no other choice than to digitize content them-selves as there were few commercial sources in the humanities. Al-though there are many commercial sources now, in some ways theirreasons for digitizing texts are valid again. Initially, they were driven by
© 2003 by the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Future of Digitized Materials: Where We Have Been and WhereWe’re Going.” Ivins, October. Co-published simultaneously in The Serials Librarian (The Haworth Informa-tion Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 44, No. 1/2, 2003, pp. 45-49; and: Transforming Seri-als: The Revolution Continues (ed: Susan L. Scheiberg, and Shelley Neville) The Haworth Information Press,an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2003, pp. 45-49. Single or multiple copies of this article are availablefor a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST).E-mail address: [email protected]].
http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J12310.1300/J123v44n12_06 45
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“ambition, ignorance and lack of money–not by stunning insights andlots of cash.” Library time is the inverse of Internet (and publisher)time. Libraries are interested in the long-term and are willing to waitseveral years to see a payoff on their digitizing investment.
Early on, the E Text Center made a bet that has paid off: to useSGML. It migrates and is nimble and malleable. The significance ofthese characteristics is coming around again. Early on, their motivatorwas their inability to support multiple interfaces.
UVa is a successful aggregator, and that experience has yielded twoimportant lessons. The first key lesson is that standardized data aggre-gates well. It uses standard metadata and is not bound up in proprietarysystems. For the time being, Web browsers provide some standardiza-tion of format and display. But the Web offers little in the way ofcross-database, multi-institution access. It that regard, we are no betteroff than in the days of CD-ROMs, with too many isolated bits of data.This model is not sustainable: Data must interact as a library. Data mustbe built, not as a stand-alone product, but to work with other content. Asexamples, Seaman mentioned slave letters, Salem witch trial docu-ments, and their Early American Fiction Collection. The individualdocuments in these collections also reside in searchable full-text data-bases.
Users provide other lessons. While the E Text Center has a firm ser-vice mission and is housed in an academic institution, its online usersare predominantly nonscholarly. Sharing statistics about their huge us-age figures, Seaman speculated that based on e-mail received, their av-erage user is 12 years old. “Whatever you think you are, you’re not ifyour users think you’re something else.” Different users have differentformat needs, so the E Text Center’s databases contain features that canbe turned on or off for different audiences. There is a huge demand forcross-database searching. Within ten years, users will be able to simul-taneously search full-text collections in multiple institutions. Even inthe short term, a document needs to behave differently in different ap-plications. Consider how a Mark Twain text might differ on a specialcollections Web site from one created by a faculty member for her un-dergraduate students.
Looking back, Seaman comes to the realization that the E Text Cen-ter is much more than a file management and retrieval system for jour-nal articles, books, etc. In a digital library, the system rarely deliversentire files. Their content is tagged so users can get just pieces–a chap-ter, or references. The Center is becoming increasingly familiar with
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providing “gobbets of information.” The 70,000 books in their holdingsrepresent millions of chunks of content.
This is the real power of SGML and now XML: To support the cre-ation of products that extract and combine types of information, al-lowing for repurposing of content in ways not possible in the printworld. No one else may want that same combination of pieces, but itdoesn’t matter. If your data is ready for the future, this is an excitingtime.
Seaman shared several anecdotes about the unexpected worldwidedemand for digital content. One major initiative is the Early AmericanFiction Collection. Much of this is not great fiction, but it now has theveneer of history and is not widely available, certainly there are rarelyclassroom editions available. The center decided to publish as Web ande-book versions 80 available works from UVa, not just those ofwell-known authors, and this has produced some dramatic results. An1830 novel, Nix’s Mate by Rufus Dawes, was downloaded 2,000 timesthe first two months it was posted and more than 6,000 times to date.The lesson here is that “The world finds users for things you wouldnever imagine.” In a second example, the center took over the publica-tion of a 40-year-old scholarly history journal. Its content would be ap-propriate for and should be available to students, including those in highschool. In print, this journal had 400 subscriptions annually. Now that itis only electronic, it receives 77,000 document views in a peak month.In March 1994, an article about Jack the Ripper was published and nowreceives as many as 5,000 downloads a month. (We have to tenure thisguy whether he wants it or not!) These examples demonstrate a lot ofevidence that if we make information available at an “appropriate cost”(not necessarily free), there is a real market for it.
Which brings us to a third and final major point: returning to formatand data portability considerations. The world of books has changedduring the last two or three years, with enormous growth in digital pub-lishing and the advent of delivery media other than the Web. In librar-ies, we’ve seen only Web-based publishing in our vision and peripheralvision–although we say “build once and use many,” we have really justmeant the Web. The acceptance of e-books and e-book readers, how-ever, is growing in the consumer market. In March 2002, Stephen Kingsold 400,000 copies of an e-book at $2.50 each. Although we should becautious about assuming that copyright and intellectual property de-bates will be resolved in the favor of libraries and their patrons (seeLawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Information
Plenary Sessions 47
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Commons in a Connected World, ISBN 037550584) we can see that theWeb is a great finding tool, but not the medium of choice for reading.Portable readers, including Palm Pilots or other PDAs, provide “a sur-prisingly not terrible” reading experience. Consumer acceptance ofe-books is real, but too many producers overprice their products. Thevalue must be in the reader’s favor: When Barnes and Noble tried tocharge $20 a book, they had few sales.
For a project sponsored by Microsoft and using their e-book reader,the center converted one of its existing digital collections to the e-bookformat. They were able to convert 1,000 texts to e-books in a week,demonstrating that this is just a new output format for the center, not alabor-intensive new production process. The project was launched inAugust 2000; by November 2000, one million e-books had been down-loaded. Currently, 1,800 free e-books from many collections are avail-able, and 6.6 million have been distributed from the Electronic TextCenter.
There are many non-Web electronic readers available. About one-thirdof the downloads from the site are for Palm Pilots, for those Seaman re-fers to as having a “high pain threshold.” Various manufacturers alsoproduce a Pocket PC, running a pocket version of MS Windows, a de-vice which supports page turning, highlighting, drawing, and editorialmarking up. It holds up to 100 books and was used in a pilot study atUVa that preloaded a semester’s worth of reading for students. Basedon this study, he believes people will buy e-books for pleasure reading,but will not pay more than print equivalents. They don’t care that itdies–that is, that the content expires after a set time period. Many othertechnologies are coming. Another recent example is a Microsoft audiobook format that does a decent job of converting text to speech. Severalfirms are working with print-on-demand technologies that would pro-duce perfect-bound books one at a time.
With the end of the conference approaching all too quickly, there wastime for a closing thought: “Libraries are fabulously well placed to (cre-ate full text that is standardized and can be repurposed), because wethink in the long term.” The only negative aspect of this engaging andthought-provoking presentation was the lack of time for questions andthat no reactor was built into the program schedule. It would have beeninteresting to explore the limitations copyright places on such activitiesand how publishers who handle content that is not in the public domainaddress these restrictions, or the challenges of supporting innovativetechnologies on the one hand while cooperating with Microsoft on the
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other. Perhaps these issues can be explored in Portland at the next con-ference. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic audience (this reporter included)was happy to close the conference on a note of optimism and high ex-pectations, even without having all the answers.
SELECTED URLS
Electronic Text Center: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/E-books Collection: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooksModern English (aggregated) Collection: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.
browse.htmlEarly American Fiction: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/Mark Twain in his Times: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/Salem Witch Trials: http://www.salemwitchtrials.org/
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
David Seaman is Director, Digital Library Foundation. October Ivins is a consultantbased in Sharon, MA.
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