The Electronic Text Center: a humanities computing initiative at the University of Virginia
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| Pages | 195-198 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045231 |
| Author | David Seaman |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Electronic Text
Center: a humanities
computing initiative at the
University of Virginia
David Seaman
Electronic
Text
Center,
Alderman
Library,
University
of
Virginia,
Charlottesville,
VA
22903,
USA
1.
Introduction
As part of an on-going commitment to the use of computers in
education and research, the University of Virginia (UVa) Li-
brary has established an Electronic Text Center and an online
collection of machine-readable texts. Open since September
1992,
the Center collects and prepares texts for inclusion into
our online text service, makes available hardware and soft-
ware that permits the computerized analysis of
text,
and pro-
vides guidance and training for these new scholarly tools.
2.
Electronic text holdings
The initial set of online texts includes the new Oxford English
Dictionary; the entire corpus of Old English writings; se-
lected Library of America titles; several versions of Shake-
speare's complete works; hundreds of literary, social,
historical, philosophical and political materials
in
various lan-
guages (chiefly from the Oxford and the Cambridge Text Ar-
chives); and the currently released parts of two massive
databases from Chadwyck-Healey: J.-P. Migne's Patrologia
Latina and
the
English Poetry Full-Text Database, comprised
of the complete works of 1350 English poets from AD 600 to
1900.
Because of contractual obligations, access
to
these texts
and searching tools is restricted to University of Virginia stu-
dents,
faculty and
staff.
Having the majority of our electronic texts available online
affords significant advantages: it eases the pressure of use on
the
Center,
gives
much more flexible and convenient access to
our users, and allows us to provide the same search and dis-
play 'front-end' for all our
collections.
Having been taught to
use one database, a user has the knowledge necessary to
search all current and future databases, thereby overcoming
the frustrations often involved with using CDROM products,
each of which may have a different interface.
The Electronic Library, Vol.
11,
No. 3, June 1993 195
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