Foreword to the Electronic Version
1) Michael Plunkett
When I was first contacted about the possibility of publishing Afro-American Sources as an electronic work, my
reaction was negative. What I remember most about my work on the book was
the enjoyment of visiting many institutions and examining outstanding
collections, with the aid of a grant that enabled me to devote my total
energy to the project. I could not imagine expanding the work without the
luxury of such uninterrupted time. But then I considered the flexibility
inherent in an electronic work. It is never static. It becomes kinetic,
always available for additions. The more I deliberated, the more advantages
became apparent. This work would require close involvement with the
University Press and the Electronic Text Center at the University of
Virginia Library. We would have to work together to examine this new process
and our cooperation would establish a framework for future electronic
publications.
Another benefit was the inclusion of images, prohibited in the print edition
for reasons of cost. Most significantly, the work would be available to a
wider and constantly expanding audience. Once I was convinced of the
efficacy of an electronic edition, the obvious place to begin adding new
entries was with my own institution, the University of Virginia. I surveyed
our holdings since 1990 and added twenty new entries. With the assistance of
the University Press, I updated addresses and added phone and fax numbers
and e-mail addresses to those institutions that responded to a request for
such information. Finally the most enjoyable part was selecting the images
and then helping David Seaman, Director of the Electronic Text Center, to
scan them.
The next obvious step is to update all the repositories and add new
collections and institutions. This depends, of course, mainly on others
submitting the information. It is my hope and the hope of the University
Press of Virginia and the Electronic Text Center that we can periodically
update this work and truly never finish it.
Michael Plunkett
2) David Seaman
This guide is a joint collaboration between Michael Plunkett, The University
Press of Virginia, and the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center.
It was undertaken both as an opportunity to provide an expanded version of
Michael's book and as a training exercise for a Press ambitious to get to
grips with a new publishing medium. While we still do not have the "pay per
use" charging mechanisms in place that will make Internet publishing a
commercial venture of the sort we would like, the Director of the University
Press realised clearly that the time had come in late 1993 to tackle the
production and distribution issues of the new medium.
The labor of producing the Guide was divided between
the participants, each drawing on his or her own strengths. The print text
of the first edition was scanned in at the Electronic Text Center by members
of the Press, who in the process learned something about scanning
technology. The newly created electronic files were delivered to Michael
Plunkett, who made his additions and revisions. After some editorial work
and proofing at the Press they were returned to the Electronic Text Center
where the WordPerfect files were converted to Standard Generalised Markup
Language (hereafter SGML) encoding, following the Text Encoding Initiative
Guidelines (hereafter TEI), and parsed.
The level of SGML markup is not exhaustive, and much was done by automatic
means, principally a series of "search and replace" routines in WordPerfect
and SED that turned proprietary markup and implicit patterns of spacial
layout into explicit SGML tags. The resulting TEI document allows us both to
have a browsing copy on the World Wide Web, by converting the TEI tags
automatically to HTML, and also to provide a searchable document that
contains database categories and sectional divisions. The Web "forms"
interface to this searchable database was designed by Jeff Herrin, in the
University of Virginia Library's Systems Office. The search software is PAT,
from OpenText, the same tool we use for all our on- line full-text databases
at the University of Virginia.
The final stage of the production was to scan a set of digital images of some
of the items in the University of Virginia section of the Guide. Michael Plunkett and I digitized various manuscripts and
photographs, creating TIFF format images at 300 dpi. From these archival
TIFF copies, JPEG files were made for use on-line. A text description and
cataloging record was added into the binary code of these image files, for
reasons of data control and attribution, according to a practise popularized
by the Electronic Text Center. Finally, I needed only to write the main Web
page for the book and connect the various parts together, drawing on the
design expertise of Janet Anderson from the University Press.
This project has been a good example of collaboration between publishers and
libraries, information managers and scholars, each drawing on his or her
particular skills and each learning from the other.
Since the Guide has been on-line, it has garnered
considerable attention and use; most constructively, perhaps, was the new
submission that was sent in from the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Va.
After reading about the Guide in a Virginia newspaper
— being the first full University Press publication on the
Internet generated several press features — they contacted Michael
Plunkett with the details of five collections in their library that were
pertinent to the subject of the Guide, and we were
able to add them as a new section the same day.
For this type of work, it would be desirable in the future for the various
institutions featured in it to take responsibility for their sections and
run them from their own Internet servers, with images of selected items
provided in the same manner that we have done for the University of Virginia
section. That would be truly to take advantage of the possibilities of the
medium, and help ensure that the Guide keeps current.
David Seaman
Electronic Text Center
University of Virginia
1995
