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 [log in to unmask]
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 [log in to unmask]
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
