UM Making of America: 685,885 pages online (fwd)

[Zimanyi Magdolna]

Szives tajekoztatasul tovabbitom

 
 Zimanyi Magda                        
 
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 23:26:48 -0500
From: John Price-Wilkin <jpwilkin at UMICH.EDU>
Reply-To: Digital Libraries Research mailing list
     <DIGLIB at INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA>
To: DIGLIB at INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA
Subject: UM Making of America:   685,885 pages online

	UM Making of America site -- 685,885 pages now online
		http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/

The University of Michigan Digital Library Initiative is proud 
to announce the completion of the first phase of its Making of 
America project, now including approximately 650,000 pages of 
books and journals from the latter part of the 19th century.  
This tremendous resource now contains 1,601 books and ten 
journals with more than 49,069 articles documenting America's 
social history.  Based on feedback solicited in earlier 
announcements for the resource, as well as local user studies, 
the current implementation adds functionality in a number of 
areas.  Notable features of the current system include the 
following:
o Users may search the full text of the 685,885 pages, 
  retrieving results almost instantly.
o The system now includes browsable bibliographies for the 
  journal articles and the monographs.
o The UM MoA resources have been encoded in a simple SGML form 
  (a 40 element DTD conforming to the TEI Guidelines); 
  consequently, we are able to seamlessly integrate both 
  automatically processed (i.e., "raw") texts, and texts whose 
  OCR and encoding is carefully evaluated (i.e., "cooked" 
  texts).  Users who encounter a "cooked" text will find 
  attractively rendered HTML with links to page images, while 
  "raw" texts are presented as page images until resources can 
  be found to improve them.  
o A major project undertaken during the summer of 1997 
  subdivided the UM MoA periodicals into articles, adding title 
  and author information to the rough OCR at the article level, 
  thus making it easier to navigate the large body of material 
  or to search for specific items.
o Although the functionality of the resource is enhanced by the 
use of browsers that support frames, the current 
implementation also supports frameless browsers.
Especially if you’ve been a user of the UM Making of American 
system in the past, we would be very interested in your 
comments.  Please take a look at the new system and send 
comments to moa-info at umich.edu.

Future Developments
The resource will continue to improve along several different 
fronts.  
o Integration with the Making of America materials at Cornell 
  University (http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/) is a high priority.
o Migration from "raw" to "cooked" can take place gradually, 
  based on the availability of resources and specific demands.  
  The Humanities Text Initiative, a part of the Digital Library 
  Production Services at the UM, will undertake the process of 
  proofing OCR and refining markup based on user demand.  A call 
  for suggestions of priorities will be made in the coming 
  weeks.
o The UM Library will be incorporating digital conversion into 
  its Preservation Department's "Brittle Books" program.  New 
  materials will be added to the MoA site as they are converted.
o Bibliographic information in monographs will be enhanced with
  improved catalog records by the end of 1997.
o We hope to work with other institutions and funding agencies 
  to make more significant additions to the MoA site.  Please 
  send expressions of interest to moa-info at umich.edu.

The project is made possible in part by a generous grant from 
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Miscellaneous statistics:
Total SGML:  1.826 gigabytes
Total words:  approximately 300 million