Home | Reports | Case Study of Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature]
My thanks for providing information and support for this case-study must go to the following:
Dr Stuart Lee (Project Manager), Paul Groves (Project Officer), Michael Popham (Head of the Oxford Text Archive), Michael Fraser (CTI Centre Manager), Joanne Lomax (UCL Library Research Officer), Kevin Taylor (CUP), Professor R. C. Alston, Mr John McIlwaine, and Caron Howarth (Senior Library Assistant).
Information technology combined with electronic publishing (1) has the potential to provide answers to many of the problems encountered by libraries and academic institutions due to the increasing demand for access to information. IT also has the potential to be used in preserving the content and context of printed information, and in increasing access to information through electronic publishing which allows text to be delivered quickly to the user via computer networks. Electronic publishing of text can also increase access to the intellectual content of the information through tools enabling close textual analysis. Copyright issues lie at the heart of electronic publishing and information provision. Publishing an existing literary text (protected by copyright) requires that permission is sought and appropriate fees paid for its use. This task is multiplied in a multimedia work where many different types of copyrighted material will be needed. The electronic publications are then themselves protected by copyright, giving the developers and publishers rights of control over the use of their work.
Rapid technological advance has made the dream of the 1970s, the 'electronic book', possible. Information (published or unpublished) can be made available in various electronic formats (such as CD-ROM, online, as part f the World Wide Web etc.) which is in essence what the 'electronic' was envisaged as doing. Electronic Publishing is currently a growing but still largely experimental business. Information published electronically can have the same intellectual content as its paper publication but has the advantage of high speed transmission to even remote workstations. This can increase the accessibility of the information. Information published electronically enables the information to be manipulated, and using ASCII format and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), text can be made searchable. This gives a flexibility to electronically published information which is not achievable in paper format and provides the potential for it to be used in a variety of products and in different ways. Multimedia products can be created which combine not only text but also graphics, music, film extracts etc., these are very different from published paper products on a similar subject (e.g. a standard children’s encyclopaedia and a multimedia version of it provide a good comparison).
The introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web into the academic and commercial arenas has encouraged experimentation in this area of electronic publishing. Major publishers keen to cash in on a new potential market and academic institutions keen to apply the new technology have committed themselves to research and development of resources to be published electronically on the World Wide Web. However, there are still several problematic issues limiting the development of electronic publications. These include issues of access, authority, preservation, and copyright.
Although there have been predictions that the advent of electronic publishing would bring with it the death of the traditional print on paper product, the printed book still has ascendancy over electronic publications in authority and sales (2). Although technology has advanced to such a state that most university scholars and students expect, and are provided with, 'free' access to the Internet and CD-ROMs etc. to support their research and study, the production, availability, and citation of printed sources continues to be of great importance. This is no where more evident than in the area of academic publishing. The scholarly journal has long been a major means of communication within the academic community and it is important to academics to be seen to be publishing their research in these traditional print on paper journals to gain prestige for their research institutions and to attract funding and professional interest. The need for up-to-date information would seem to make the Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) journals ideal candidates for electronic publication. However, academics are reluctant, to commit the publication of their research to a journal published only in electronic form due to the uncertainty surrounding their access, prestige and authority. Academic libraries also face issues raised by parallel (electronic and paper) publication as well as increased demand for services and reduced funding. That advances in electronic publishing is largely contributing to the rapid evolution of teaching methods, information provision, and access in higher education has been recognised and funding has been provided, for a limited period, to examine the issues involved.
Libraries have long been repositories and providers of information. Now they find their reducing budgets must stretch to cover not only rising subscription costs to print based journals but electronic subscriptions tand products too. It is not yet the case that paper journals can be replaced with electronic versions (although some are available in electronic form and projects such as JSTOR (3) are examining the access and preservation issues involved) but there is a high possibility that this will happen in the future. The decisions made will have a direct effect on the services they can offer at present and in the future, and there are many problematic financial, preservation, and access issues for the library to consider when making decisions on acquisition format. However, academic library users continue to expect their libraries to provide both paper and electronic products, and increasingly require user support for electronic publications and packages used to aid research and independent learning.
The rapid evolution of the Higher Education System, it's increase in student numbers and demand for information, changes to its internal communication structure (e.g. E-mail), and new teaching methods made possible by advances in computer technology have prompted a number of reports on the situation to be commissioned. Of special interest here are the Follett Report (4) , the Anderson Report (5), and most recently the Dearing Report (6). The Follett Report investigated the future national needs for the development of library and information resources and identified possible ways of meeting those needs. Amongst other things, the report recommended that Higher Education funding councils should jointly invest twenty million pounds over three years to support a series of research and development projects designed to further the use of information technology (IT) in a variety of selected areas including teaching, preservation, and copyright (7). This was to be run under their Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and would benefit from the guidance of an expert advisory group. It is particularly relevant to this report as JISC provided the funding for the JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP) project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature (VSTL) which is examined as a case-study below to highlight issues of access, preservation and copyright currently affecting the development of electronic publishing.
The Anderson Report was commissioned by the Follett Implementation Group as part of the Joint Funding Councils Library Review to review recent developments since the Follett Report, and report on the situation making recommendations as required. The changes in Higher Education are of current national interest and importance. This can be seen in the recent publication of the Dearing Report which was commissioned by the UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment to advise on the long term development of Higher Education as a whole, and included recommendations affecting library and information resources. These reports have, and will continue to, greatly affect the development of library and information provision in the UK and will be referred to throughout this report.
An interest in the British Libraries involvement in the digitisation of the only surviving copy of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript Beowulf in the Electronic Beowulf project led me to further explore how information technology was being used in preservation and in the teaching of English Literature. Whilst working (8) at the English Faculty Library at Oxford University I encountered the Pilot Rosenberg Tutorial (9) which caught my interest. After arriving at University College London as a postgraduate library student I contacted Mike Fraser of the Office for Humanities Communication requesting information on digital preservation. He put me in touch with Joanne Lomax, library research officer at UCL who suggested I could pursue my interest in this area through a case-study of a project involved in the promotion of access and preservation of texts through digitisation. I was particularly interested in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project because of my having seen the seminar of the the pilot study, and their use of the Owen Archive housed at the English Faculty Library where I have worked. I contacted Dr Stuart Lee and Paul Groves at the Humanities Computing Unit who kindly agreed to let me write my case-study on their project. I was provided with access to information about the virtual seminars, their creation, the virtual seminars themselves, and was able to ask questions and obtain feedback of the Project Manager and Officer via email.
Methodology for this project included attendence at two workshops (10) to ensure a knowledge of current issues involved in such projects. Observation of the project through three visits to Oxford to discuss the project with the Project Manager and Officer of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project, and to see the seminars which were not initially available to me over the WWW. A visit to the Arts and Humanities Data Service at Oxford to discuss the Oxford Text Archives involvement in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project with Michael Popham (11). Hands on examination of the pre-release seminars over the World Wide Web by password access. General research including printed, and electronic forms of information. Too late in the writing of this report I wrote to six scholarly publishers requesting information on their permissions procedures regarding the republication of material in electronic form and have as yet received no replies. However, a contact at Cambridge University Press kindly sent me some indication of the policy at CUP regarding this when I wrote to him by email. Unfortunately I will be unable to attend two events closely related to this reports subject. These are Virtual Campus, Real Learning (Association for learning technology annual conference) ironically to be held on the day this report is due in 15th September 1997, and Digital Resources for the Humanities '97, 14-17th September 1997. It may be frustrating that I will be unable to attend but it does show the currency of the subject.
This report intends to examine the issues of access, preservation, and copyright regarding electronic publishing and the use of information technology through a case-study of the JISC funded project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature in progress at Oxford University. The report will discuss how information technology and electronic publishing can increase access to information, how digitization can be used in the preservation of deteriorating original material, how copyright affects the use of electronic information and how digital watermarking of electronic documents and other tools can be used in the fixing of bibliographic and ownership information to electronic publications.
Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature - an investigation into the practicalities and viability of providing access to tuition in English Literature through independent computer assisted learning.
Chapter 1 drew attention to recent and continuing changes in the UK system of Higher Education, and the increasing demands for information associated with increasing numbers of students entering Higher Education, and societies reliance on IT. These changes demand a proactive response from librarians and information providers, as well as the Higher Education providers, to ensure that access to, and preservation of, information is adequately maintained for the benefit of both present and future users. The project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature, the case study in this report, is only a small part of a larger initiative currently concerned with the research into, and development of, library and teaching resources in higher education. This chapter will place this project which aims to develop methods of providing access to good quality teaching and learning resources via computer technology, whilst maintaining the preservation of information in such fragile and transient form, in the context of higher education and the current initiatives in process. Opportunities and risks involved in computer assisted independent education will be discussed, as well as the concept of the virtual seminar and the suitability of the World Wide Web as a means of access to such packages.
Following the Follett Report review of academic libraries in 1993, to investigate the future national needs for the development of library and information resources, generous funding was allocated by the UK higher education funding bodies to research projects committed to the development and testing of resources for teaching and research in higher education in accordance with the recommendations of the report. There was a particular emphasis on developing the use of information technology:
Recent developments ... in information technology present major opportunities and challenges for academic libraries ... 20 million [should be invested] over three years in support of a series of development projects designed to further the use of IT in selective areas. ... This investment should include the development of standards, pilot projects to demonstrate the potential of on-demand publishing and electronic document and article delivery, ... the development of a database and dataset strategy, [and] investment in navigational tools, ... The exploitation of IT is essential to create the effective library service of the future.(12)
To ensure the most appropriate and effective allocation of the funding it was decided that the recommendations of the Follett Report would be implemented within a IT orientated libraries initiative under the auspices of the funding councils' Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) ... run for a finite period and would be guided by an expert advisory group ...(13) . A detailed proposal for the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project (14) was put forward by the Humanities Computing Unit (HCU) based at Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in response to an invitation for bids for funding from JISC. To support its application the proposal drew attention to its work in the area of computer based learning packages, and the success and expertise gained in the HCUs pilot-project (a virtual seminar entitled Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches') (15). It also emphasised the proposed projects concern to address JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP) objectives and issues raised in Exploiting Information Systems in Higher Education: An Issues Paper (16). These included:
The Project Proposal was accepted and funding was provided through JTAP. The total amount of money requested was £50000 over two years including hardware and software needed for scanning, and to create the on-line seminars, as well as the salary for an appropriately qualified research assistant (18).
The project is based at the Oxford University Computing Centre and therefore had access to local expertise in the genre through the English Faculty of Oxford University. Due to the small number, and introductory nature of, the virtual seminars to be created, it was inevitable that the content had to be limited. A decision was made to limit the focus of the seminars to the British poets of the Western Front(19). Those involved in the creation of the seminars recognised that by doing this they risked being accused of perpetuating the canonical stance that has often been the bane of English Literature (20) but engage the accusation claiming:
By concentrating on these poets it is not being suggested that they are simply the best writers of their period or that poets and poems omitted are in any way inferior. This simply reflects the material and expertise at hand (21).
Careful attention has been paid to design and content to make the user aware that the seminars do not contain the complement of literary works and writing on World War I poetry, but instead an introduction to the study of British World War I poets from the Western Front. The seminars actively encourage the user to explore the genre further by putting in additional material, such as Trench Songs and War Poetry written by women, as well as providing detailed references for all material used in the seminars. The seminars also introduce the user to techniques and tools which are helpful in textual analysis, introducing manuscript studies and editorial practices, and the use of concordances.
After the proposal stage it was found that not only could the project have extensive access to the literary manuscripts of war poet Wilfred Owen, held at the English Faculty Library in Oxford, but that the permissions for publishing it in electronic form on the WWW was affordable. This development led to a shift in project emphasis to make use of this valuable primary material in extending the idea of the creation of a World War I archive to include as much of the Owen manuscripts (in the form of digital images) as the project could afford. This is discussed further in the Chapter 4.
By selecting the genre of World War I Poetry as the focus for the seminars the successful Rosenberg seminar could be included into the project. The inclusion of the pilot seminar brought with it advantages such as a tested and effective design base on which to build, and a known product because it has been well publicised and accessed by many. Therefore a possibility exists that those in the provision of higher and distance education, as well as target users, may have heard of it even if they have not accessed it. These users of the pilot seminar may find their way to its companion virtual seminars in their attempt to revisit the site, and may tell others of the resource. The virtual seminars were created to be used, and of use, so attraction of users is an important consideration, and the tested design base has cut out a lot of trial and error, and informed the design of the proposed seminars.
Distance education has long been available in the form of postal correspondence courses, and the various products of technological advances such as radio, television, audio tapes, and videos have been exploited in aiding the distant student with his/her studies. Distant education courses, such as those of the Open University, have been used to successfully supplement and replace traditional institutionally based teaching. Distance education offers those who missed out on further education, wish to acquire additional qualifications whilst continuing in full-time work, have responsibilities preventing them from attending traditionally taught courses, or who simply wish to learn a new subject for pleasure in their leisure time find the flexibility of self-study helpful. The user can work at their own pace whilst still benefiting from the support and feedback of professional teaching staff and good quality course notes.
Today's society has many pressures upon its time and time is seen as a precious resource. Distance education is a successful and popular method of education with adults, and those involved in providing distance education are taking advantage of the potential offered to them via the Internet and the WWW to provide distance education direct to a students desktop Personal Computer (PC). Those in traditional education provision have also recognised the potential of IT to extend and develop new teaching and research resources within an institution as well as a means of supporting their own distance learners. The increase in student number and decrease in funding in higher education as a whole has put pressure on expensive, resource intensive, teaching methods such as seminars and tutorials as well as library resources. Many projects are currently researching how IT could be used to ease this pressure but there is concern that computer based teaching resources could compromise the quality of the teaching or the learning experience of the student.
The combination of the best aspects of traditional education and the recent developments in information and communications technology could is allowing the realisation of computer based distance independent learning. Such packages have the advantages of good quality teaching, appropriate resource access, and the flexibility to be used at any time, and at ones own pace. However, there is a real risk that quality of teaching could be sacrificed in the race to cut costs and gloss over the limitations and problems of computer based learning. It has been suggested that:
most institutions that are exploring the development of distance independent programs are motivated by the bottom line; they need to cut costs and increase revenue. Inherent in this pursuit of distance learning as a profit-making venture is the paring down and consolidation of faculty. ... A likely result is that there would be less pressure to maintain faculty for disciplines in which there might be less demand. Rather than tenuring a faculty member to teach, for example, rococo art, an institution could periodically contract for one to come in and update the learning materials for that subject. (22)
In my opinion this is a very real danger. However, it is a danger which should be recognised and monitored, I do not believe it should prevent research into how IT can be used for the benefit of education. Instead it should encourage providers of higher education to remember the benefits of traditional tutor/student and student/student contact in a learning environment and seek to continue them. Appropriateness of the computer based method for teaching a particular subject and issues of pedagogy must be considered. Independent computer based learning reduces significantly the contact of the user with teachers and fellow students and can therefore prevent the learning resulting from group discussion and the facility to ask questions. Significant compensation can be made for this in the design of the computer based teaching package and the virtual seminars of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project are a good example of how attention to design in response to users needs, can produce a package which provides good quality tuition and encourages interaction and discussion of the subject matter.
The UK system of higher education is benefiting from the injection of JISC funding for research into the application of IT to teaching and research in higher education. The system of application by detailed proposal and estimated costs, and then provision of external funding if the proposal is accepted, allows the research to be as objective as possible This encourages the design of the teaching package to be appropriate to the teaching of its particular subject, and to have taken into consideration the expectations and needs of the user. The following section will concentrate on the seminars of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project whose seminars are created for independent computer based learning either on site or remotely. The seminars could be described as different-time/different-place (23) environments as they are self contained virtual seminars which do not require the user to connect to the resource at a specified time to link up with a tutor or other users. Discussion of the design features of the seminars will therefore concentrate on the issues involved in the creation of such seminars and will not seek to cover other tools for distance education of individuals or groups such as computer assisted video conferencing in any detail. However, some of the features discussed will also apply to such methods.
Seminars (also known as tutorials) are used predominantly in disciplines within the Humanities in most institutions of higher education. Seminars are an important means of teaching students in the Humanities because focused tuition is possible whilst still allowing interaction between student and lecturer, and between the students themselves, not usually possible in the more formal lecture situation. This interaction is important in the to allow students to challenge, support, and explore ideas put forward, rather than passively accepting the lecturers viewpoint. A seminar in the discipline of English Literature would typically consist of a small number of students who had been asked to read and analyse a text (or texts) before the seminar and come prepared to discuss their findings with their tutor and fellow students. In addition to reporting on their own findings, and hearing those of fellow students, the students would expect to receive focused tuition from their tutor on the particular texts discussed.
With the increasing number of undergraduates entering the higher education system, and the decreasing funding for the system as a whole, many institutions are facing financial constraints which are putting pressure on this effective but expensive method of teaching. As a result students receive fewer seminars, and the seminars that take place have a higher number of students in them than desired for this method of tuition, in order to keep costs as low as possible. As funding decreases and student number increases staff may be forced to discontinue seminars due to the cost, and the impracticallity of conducting seminars with few staff and many students. Seminar quality can vary significantly within institutions and can suffer badly from students lack of preparation or willingness to participate, or a tutors lack of focus or enthusiasm.
The virtual seminar is an attempt to preserve the best aspects of traditional humanities teaching, using the potential offered by new media and new capabilities (24). In the case of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project, the virtual seminar is a structured series of on-line Web pages which have been specifically designed and created for the purpose of providing the user with access to appropriate teaching and digital resources on World War I Poetry. They have been designed to encourage interactive use rather than browsing and can be used via the WWWs hypermedia environment. The four virtual seminars mounted on the WWW by the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature (including the previously mounted Rosenberg seminar) demonstrate the variety of design and format which can be exploited to create a seminar most appropriate to its content. Two of the seminars, An Introduction to World War I Poetry and Break of Day in the Trenches, can be browsed but encourage interactive use by asking users to participate in discussion about the content of the seminars. The remaining two seminars, An Introduction to Manuscript Study and An Introduction to Text Analysis, require interactive participation from the user and are tools which could be applied to the teaching of other texts without much alteration. The seminars were designed individually to display different methods of teaching and provide effective teaching of their content. Consequently they are quite different from each other but have recognisable design constants e.g. navigational icons to aid the user in becoming adept in navigating the seminars (the Rosenberg seminar is slightly different due to its earlier design).
The terms Internet, WWW, and Information Superhighway are often used interchangeably but have quite distinct functions. To understand these it may be helpful to consider the definitions given to them by JISC:
Internet: A group of networks world wide (but mostly in North America and Europe) using a common protocol, the Internet Protocol (IP), such that data can be transmitted seamlessly. In particular the Internet supports facilities such as e-mail and World Wide Web (WWW). ... WWW: World Wide Web (or W3, or The Web) is a public domain distributed multimedia hypertext system developed by CERN. Information can include text, graphics, sound or video, which can be accessed by selecting highlighted words in a document. Resources are provided in a standardised way and can be linked indefinitely, providing a truly world-wide information system. Use has expanded enormously so that the majority traffic on many networks is now for WWW. ... Information Superhighway: ... A set of computer networks of a national and international scale which are very widely available, especially to the public, and containing a wealth of information. The Internet is widely regarded as the prototype of an information (super)highway. (25)
The WWW was initially developed to allow institutions within higher education to communicate and share findings and other information but it was quickly discovered that it had further potential (26). The WWW is attractive in the provision of distance education because it is so accessible. Many students in higher education enjoy 'free' access to the WWW through the Web server of their institutions mainframe computer and clusters of PCs available for students use, as the institution pays the bill. University staff usually enjoy the same privilege, therefore a computer assisted learning package or 'courseware' (material developed to provide students with information relating to their taught courses) on the WWW, developed by staff, could be published on the WWW for 'free'. Of course this excludes the costs in time, copyright clearing, and other costs involved in developing the courseware. Once published on the Web, the material is available to a wide and international audience, although this is limited to those with Internet access. Apart from maintenance of the site, very few other costs should be incurred.
The public (potential students of computer assisted distance education) also have access to the WWW through private connections to the Internet, through their places of work, and increasingly now through public libraries. However, because unlike in academia the costs are visible and paid for regularly by the individuals accessing the Internet they are likely to spend less time connected to the network due to reasons of cost. Many in the UK alone would like to have access to the Internet but are not able to afford the still expensive hardware, software, and connection costs associated with connection, and may not have access to machines set up to allow public access for a fee. However, more public libraries are providing a computer terminal dedicated to provide access to the Internet at fees from £3 per half hour (27) to make it accessible to the public.
Characteristics making the WWW particularly useful in the dissemination of computer assisted learning packages include the ease by which the mark-up language used in creating WWW documents, Hypertext Mark up Language (HTML), can be used to enable hypertext links (text containing pointers to related text in the same document or other sites on the Internet (28)) to be created and followed. Links are easy to create and can be made to information on the author's PC hard drive and CD-ROM in the UK, and as simply to other Web sites based in other countries e.g. the USA.
They are just as easily removed which is an important consideration given that many Web sites are removed from the Web daily, or change their Uniform Resource Locator (URL) rendering the links invalid. Being a multimedia hypertext system the WWW allows the use of graphics, video, and sound as well as text which is particularly useful in the delivery of computer assisted learning. Development of advanced programming language, such as Java, has overcome some of the problems of the slowness of the network and made animation of graphics on the WWW possible although it is not perfect and there are still other problems that need to be overcome.
Due to the popularity of the WWW programming languages and navigational tools are being developed quickly, increasing the possibilities for Web publishing and for users to find sites that contain the information they require. Currently navigational tools such as Netscape and Internet Explorer can be downloaded from the WWW free of charge (apart from connection charges) and search engines such as Alta Vista and Yahoo can be used directly from their Web sites. These tools are easy to use although some retrieve more accurate 'hits' than others. They have been significant in helping to popularise the use of the WWW as users with little technical knowledge of computers have found they are able to use it, through these tools, with relative ease. These reasons make the WWW ideal for use in the dissemination of computer assisted learning. There are however some problems associated with the Web such as slowness in downloading of Web documents due to insufficient bandwidth and overuse of inlaid graphics etc. (29), but these are likely to be overcome as solutions are sought and found because of the excitement and popularity surrounding this relatively recent phenomenon.
Chapter 2 placed the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature in the context of current initiatives in process to develop the provision of access to, and the preservation of, information in electronic form. Chapter 3 will build on this, focusing on how the project has sought to provide access to information through virtual seminars which have been developed in ways appropriate to the information within them, and take into account the needs of potential users. The content of the virtual seminar An Introduction to World War I Poetry will be compared to the content of a typical face-to-face seminar, and the virtual seminar An Introduction to Manuscript Study will be discussed in detail. The description and discussion will highlight the careful attention to the design of the virtual seminars which aim to provide effective communication of information to the remote student, and ease of access via these independent computer assisted learning packages.
Dr Stuart Lee (30) had found his pilot virtual seminar Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches' (made available on-line on the WWW in 1995) to successfully encourage users of the seminar to explore the poem, consider it afresh in the context of supporting historical information, engage them with issues of interpretation and literary theory, and motivate them to comment on their findings via e-mail (31). This site attracted extensive publicity in the press and on the WWW, and has been attracting over 400 accesses a month (32). As discussed above, in todays society there is an increasing need for flexible methods of distance learning. The feedback received from the pilot Rosenberg seminar demonstrated that the creation and electronic publication of virtual seminars on the WWW was an effective and attractive means of meeting this need.
The Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature Project took World War I Poetry as their focus for a combination of reasons relating to design but also situation. The seminars were designed to be suitable for use by a varied audience but aimed to be of particular benefit to those in higher education, especially undergraduates studying English Literature. However, World War I poetry figures in GCSE and A-level Syllabi, and is studied at postgraduate as well as undergraduate level. It is also a subject in which people outside higher education can have a general interest in that it does not appear 'elitist' because of its connection to an event which so affected our history. The four seminars are individually complete and could be used independently of the others, but it is recommended in the introduction to the seminars that all four seminars are worked through in a specified order to get the most out of them. This is because they have been designed to work together as a complete course giving an introduction to the genre, selected poets, their works, and techniques in textual analysis and editing. Special attention has been given to the design of the seminars to enable them to be applied to different fields of literature so that other interested parties can make use of the knowledge gained through the project and use it in the creation of their own effective virtual teaching resources, meeting objectives of JISC and JTAP referred to above.
Courseware can be defined as educational software for use in onsite or remote computer assisted learning. The advancement of technology has enabled the exploitation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), multimedia (the integration of two or more different media e.g. images and video within a computer system (33)), and hypermedia (the extension of the hypertext paradigm to multimedia (34)) in the production of courseware. This advancement has resulted in the ability to produce courseware which goes far beyond simply adding course notes in electronic form into a computer database, allowing remote access to educational material. It enables the student to have an increased quality of learning experience by allowing them to work at their own pace and by providing access to materials. This is not to say that computers provide a better learning environment for the student than e.g. face-to-face tutorials but, that for subjects appropriate to the medium, computer assisted learning packages may provide a better quality of distance education than the traditional distance learning packs containing a combination of books, tapes, and videos.
Computer assisted learning may also provide a useful supplement to on site tuition. If copyright permission could be obtained from the holder of appropriate material there is also the potential for virtual seminars to provide increased access to material of great value in learning, but which is often difficult to gain access to. This might include access to required reading extracts for taught courses (face-to-face and remotely) to replace photocopied 'course packs', and supplement the decreasing number of course texts found in the library, and particularly to material such as manuscripts which the student would not normally be able to access in any other way due to distance or restrictions on access. In the absence of face-to-face tutorials, computer assisted learning packages can provide a good second as will be demonstrated below, but I am not suggesting that virtual seminars should replace face-to-face seminars (neither do those involved in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project).
Attention will now be focused on the design of the virtual seminars in the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature. The design of the seminars is extremely important in communicating instruction to the remote student, as well as providing a balanced learning experience. Design failure of such seminars renders it's resources inaccessible and demotivates the student at the very least, impeding the students learning and perhaps causing the student to reject valuable opportunities of computer assisted learning in future cases. Well designed seminars in contrast make use of the available tools which are most appropriate to be used in presenting the material of the seminar in an interesting but clear way. By using methods appropriate to the material within the seminar they should be able to hold and develop a students interest, giving opportunities for students to use what they learn. Discussion is one way of letting students come into contact with information and ideas other than those presented in the seminar. These can be used effectively to stimulate discussion and explore the subject discussed in the seminar further. There are many tools now that can link remote students via computer networks to facilitate real time discussion between students. Creative use of email can be used to facilitate discussions between students even where students access the resources at different times as they do in the virtual seminars discussed here.
The structure and content of the seminar An Introduction to World War I Poetry will be discussed in comparison to a typical face-to-face seminar on the same subject, and An Introduction to Manuscript Study will be examined in detail to highlight particular design features of the seminars as it is the most interactive of the four seminars. The Rosenberg seminar will not be described here as a comprehensive publication (35) clearly describing the project, and the seminar can be freely accessed and used by the interested reader who makes use of the URL given in the footnote. However, many of the design features commented on below can be found to be built on those operating in the pilot seminar. The seminar introducing tools for textual analysis will be discussed in the next chapter where text encoding is also introduced. I am grateful to those involved in the project for allowing me access to the three pre-release versions of the virtual seminars (the Rosenberg tutorial is freely available to all over the WWW) to enable me to comment on them in this report. It must be stressed that the seminars I viewed were still in process and that the descriptions given here may not reflect changes that have been made since I viewed them (36).
The traditional face-to-face seminar has long been established as an effective means of teaching English Literature to students. It seems that in the attempt to create an effective virtual seminar, the content and structure of a typical face-to-face English Literature seminar has been considered, and used, in the design of An Introduction to World War I Poetry which disseminates information of the nature taught in the traditional situation. To demonstrate how this translates into an effective virtual seminar it is useful to compare them.
Students of a face-to-face introductory seminar with their tutor on World War I Poetry might be requested to read a variety of poems from a group of contemporary poets, and expected to do some basic background reading on the poets and their period. The students would expect to learn more about the period and the chosen poets from their tutor, discuss their own findings, and engage with the tutors and fellow students comments in a group discussion. The virtual seminar An Introduction to World War I Poetry (37) is designed to introduce World War I Poetry through the works of five contemporary World War I poets (see Figure 1.).
The notes in the seminar introduction inform the student to expect the content under each poet or topic to include an introduction to each of the poets or topics (in a similar form to clear lecture notes), a featured poem for each of the poets in the seminar (selected for its appropriateness to the seminars theme), some literary criticism of the featured poem, and further relevant information and texts such as letters and photographs. Additional material, such as biographical information about the poets and a selection of Women's WWI Poetry and Trench Poetry & Songs, is provided to enable students to place the poets and their poetry in context. The virtual seminar is given direction by having a theme (in this case that of 'injury') as a focus. A detailed Seminar Introduction (see Figure 2.) gives an introduction to the seminar as a whole and a brief overview of the genre of poetry to be studied.
The poetry, and some of the introductory material compares with material in electronic form the student would have been asked or expected to read before a seminar, and the introduction, overview, direction, further information, additional material, and detail is what students might expect to learn from, or be referred to by, the tutor in a traditional face-to-face seminar. It is perhaps true that the thread of a face-to-face seminar could be said to be easier to follow because the student is guided along by the tutor. However, there is a Navigational Information section in the virtual seminar which clearly explains, using text and images, how to navigate the seminar (see Figure 3.), what the icons mean, and what features are available in the seminar.
Should a user become lost in the multipage virtual seminar, a seminar map is available at click of an icon (which lists the contents of the entire seminar in detail). This allows the user to immediately jump to the place they wish to be by simply clicking on the hypertext describing it. Figure 4. shows the icons as they appear in this tutorial offering help to the student in finding their way through the seminar at the click of a mouse.
Inter-student discussion is an important part of a face-to face seminar. In the virtual seminar the student has access to a Discussion Board which encourages students to participate in an on going discussion about the poetry in the seminar via e-mail. If the seminar was being used as part of a taught course at an institution, tutors could also post messages to the board to challenge views and encourage further discussion of the seminar content. The student can send in his/her findings, read messages sent by other users, and respond to the comments and questions of others. Particularly helpful features of the discussion board include the facility to respond to specific messages, search existing messages by keywords (including the names of poets), and the facility by which a user can be notified by e-mail when others respond to their message. The search facility would enable a student interested in a particular poet and/or topic to list messages containing comments on that poet/topic without having to trawl through messages irrelevant to his/her needs. Only one months correspondence is kept on the discussion board, but the previous messages are kept in a World War I Discussion Archive which can be searched just as the Discussion Board can. This a good way of keeping the discussion current without preventing access to older messages.
The virtual seminar An Introduction to Manuscript Study will now be examined in close detail to highlight particular design features which occur in this particular seminar and some which occur throughout the seminars. Heavy use will be made of screen shots to aid the description of features of the seminars which would be most appropriately described by computer demonstration. If this report was mounted on the WWW, the actual virtual seminars could be directly linked to the comments here to allow the reader to experience the seminars for themselves and the screenshots would not be needed. The references taken from the WWW could also be linked to the report by hypertext, allowing readers to see the comments in their original context, and gain further information on areas where I have had to limit my discussion due to the limits of time, expertise, and space - that is the beauty of hypertext! However, this report is in printed format so I have made liberal use of screenshots. These are used with the permission of the Project Manager and Project Officer of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature Project. The screen shots are black and white but the seminars appear in colour on the WWW.
To enable easy recognition of the virtual seminars, reports, and additional material relating to the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project, use of the colours grey and green is made throughout in addition to similar fonts used in the headings. The purpose of An Introduction to Manuscript Study is to introduce the student to editorial practices and manuscript studies and to enable the student to use what s/he has learnt in the creation of her/his own edition.
In a face-to-face seminar the student is guided through the programme by the tutor and the student is able to ask for help if required. All the virtual seminars in the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature are different place/different time (38) seminars as opposed to same-time/different-place seminars where students and tutors connect from different places at the same scheduled time. They seminars are not designed to have a human tutor connected to the resource at the same time as the student to give help, nor other students connected at the same time for discussion, and connections are made from many different places. This makes the introduction and directional instruction to the seminar very important as they contribute highly to the success or failure of the student in accessing the seminar and the material within and the quality of learning experienced. Figure 5. shows part of the first 'page' of the seminar An Introduction to Manuscript Study. It is obvious from the screens frame that the seminar is being viewed through the Netscape Web Brower, and it is expected that most will access the seminars via this or another Web Browser freely available for downloading from the WWW. In Figure 5. it can also be seen how the aims of the seminar have been clearly listed, and the stages of the seminar programme carefully laid out. Further down the first 'page' (see Figure 6.), the stages of editing are summarised in a simple but effective diagram to visually reinforce the textual instruction given in the introduction, and in my opinion this works well. Multimedia is very effective in summarising and reinforcing points made in text:
The pedagogical strength of multimedia is that it uses the natural information-processing abilities that we already possess as humans. Our eyes and ears, in conjunction with our brain, form a formidable system for transforming meaningless sense data into information, that is data imbued with meaning. The old saying that 'a picture is worth a thousand words' often understates the case especially with regard to moving images ... [another] advantage of multimedia courseware over the text-based variety is that it looks better. (39)
Careful attention to the stages involved in the seminar, and the route through it, is crucial to the students understanding of the point of the seminar and his/her progress through it and benefit gained from it.
Hypermedia 'buttons' are found throughout the seminars to facilitate the jump to the next stage of the seminar or to choose between options given. In Figure 7. the 'start button', which facilitates the jump to Introduction to Stage I of the seminar can be seen along with the additional text instructions which is particularly useful to aid those unfamiliar with the seminars conventions or computers in general. Information about the creator of the Web pages is clearly visible on all 'pages' of text. This can be seen in the bottom left corner of Figure 7. and the hypermedia envelope icon gives email access to the creator of the 'pages' should a problem be found with them (such as the persistent failure of a page to load). This will be especially important in the release of a new teaching resource as any problems can be identified by users and cleared up by the 'pages' creator. This identification of the creator of the pages is also helpful in questions arising about copyright.
At the foot of the Seminar Aims section the student is given access to the background material Biography of Wilfred Owen and Background to Dulce et Decorum est via hypertext. The student has the option of accessing them at the time of seeing the hypertext of after reading part of the whole of the 'page' (and could technically get back to this point to read them at any stage in the seminar by using the 'back button' on his/her Web browser) but the position of the 'buttons' is such that it encourages the student to read this material after the aims of the seminar and before the rest of the introduction which has the benefit of informing the student throughout the rest of the seminar. The use of hypertext here, over a linear insertion of the material into the text, gives a student who has previously worked through the seminar An Introduction to Manuscript Study the option of rereading or ignoring the Biography of Wilfred Owen. This choice is helpful in allowing the student to make best use of his/her time, and demonstrates how the seminars have been designed to cater for students who have followed the recommended course through the previous seminars and those encountering this seminar without reference to the others in the series.
Other design features incorporated into the first 'page' add to the evidence of the careful attention to the needs of the user in the design of the seminars in the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature . It is not easily apparent from the screen shots given here, but the first 'page' has been divided into three sections, each of which contains enough information to fill the computer screen. Figure 5. contains the first section almost in its entirety. At the foot of each of these sections is hypertext which can be clicked to take the user back to the top of the 'page' but the scroll bar can also be used at any time to move up and down the screen. This is continued throughout the 'pages' of text in the seminar except in the case of the background material Biography of Wilfred Owen and Background to Dulce et Decorum est, as this is not easily broken up into such sections. Use of white space (space on the computer screen containing no text or other object) is also important in the design of 'pages' such as these, where text must be read and assimilated, because it is now known that text is much more difficult to read on screen than in a printed text. Intelligent use of white space on screen therefore makes the seminar content easier for the student to read, as well as less daunting and more attractive as a to the user. It is easier for the student to read and assimilate the information in the seminar, and more attractive to read, if the information is divided into sections as discussed above, or another linked 'page' is added, instead of packing too much text and multimedia into the space of one screen.
In providing access to good quality digital facsimile images of Wilfred Owen's original manuscripts this seminar demonstrates the increased access that tools such as these virtual seminars can give to material that students would rarely have contact with (40). Of course access to such works can only be given legally if permission has been granted by the copyright holder (which in this case it has).
This seminar gives the student access to high quality digital images (reduced in size but in 24-bit colour at 72dpi in JPEG file format (41)) of four original manuscripts of Owen's Dulce et Decorum est. Working from images of Owen's original manuscripts has a great potential to increase the students motivation and stimulate a greater interest in the subject. The use of such high quality digital images in the tuition of manuscript study certainly gives a better base from which to learn than some of the barely readable photocopies that students sometimes have to work with. Books containing high resolution colour photographs of manuscripts are expensive, but most universities are now providing computers which could be used to display manuscript images on screen.
However, the high quality of the images requires a powerful computer to display them. Older generation PCs have lower resolution screens and therefore cannot display the manuscript images to the same high standard as more recent PCs. This is a problem for those with older generation PCs wanting to access the seminars as they will not be able to experience the seminars at the quality they have been designed to be delivered in, resulting in an inferior learning experience. However, the Dearing Report's recommendation 46 should help to lessen this problem as we get closer to the year 2000, although it will incur much cost:
We recommend that by 2000/01 all higher education institutions should ensure that all students have open access to a Networked Desktop Computer, and expect that by 2005/06 all students will be required to have access to their own portable computer. (42)
Due to the need of the student to compare four manuscripts of the poem in a way which allows the hand-written words on the manuscript images to be read reasonably easily a different 'page' format had to be created than that designed for the 'pages' of textual instruction and background information, discussed above. The solution was found in the use of several frames within one screen shown in Figure 8.. These frames are an excellent way of presenting the material described below in a coherent and useable fashion but the disadvantage of using frames is that they can increase the time the screen takes to load (just as high quality digital images can). This was not found to be much of a problem when I accessed the 'pages' which made use of frames unless I tried to use them at a time when the Web is renowned for being slow (from 12noon - 3pm) due to heavy traffic (of information flow). In such a case I had to wait the unacceptable time of 8 minutes for the whole screen to become active. Such a wait would frustrate a user and the probable reaction would be to close it down and try again another time, or to close it and fail to look at it again. However, the average time I found I had to wait for the screens using frames to load and become fully active was just 2 minutes (over a variety of periods during the day) which I found reasonable given the high quality of the images. The computer I was using was a fairly old 486 with connection to the WWW through the university network (43).
Each frame has enough space for about four hand-written lines of a manuscript to be viewed in each of the upper and lower frames. The scroll bars at the side allow the student to scroll up and down each frame, enabling the different versions of several lines of poetry to be compared. Given the limited screen space, and the need to view the manuscript images at a size easily read, only two frames were created in the screen, allowing the comparison of only two manuscripts at any one time. However, eight hypermedia 'buttons' at the base of the screen labelled with the letters A-D (to ditinguish the manuscripts from each other without causing bias by revealing any further information about them) enable to student to compare all four manuscripts in what ever order and in whichever frame s/he chooses. Figure 9. is enlarged to give an impression of the high quality of the manuscript images. The hypermedia 'buttons' which are the lowest indicate the images in the upper and lower frames by lowering the appropriate button A-D under each heading. Should a student wish to view more than four lines of poetry in a manuscript at once, the frame size can be extended by dragging the frame to the desired size with the mouse, however this would obscure the other manuscript image in the second frame and prevent simultaneous comparison of the different versions. Again, there is a hypermedia 'button' to enable the student to proceed to the next stage of the seminar which contains textual instruction on creating an edition and allows the student to select one of the manuscripts as a base manuscript on which to build his/her edition.
I found I encountered problems in display of the seminars features when accessing these seminar 'pages' through the browser Netscape 2.02 (44). The hypermedia buttons indicating which manuscript is in each frame do not seem to work in this browser. The buttons load the connected manuscript into the frame when clicked but do not descend below the other buttons to indicate that manuscript 'X' is in the frame. Consequently it is easy to forget which manuscripts you have in the frames when you are comparing four very similar manuscript variants.
The framed format is used again to enable the student to edit a plain text version of the base manuscript they chose (in a similar way in which one would use a word processor) whilst viewing the four manuscripts (one at a time) in the frame above. The selected base manuscript is then loaded automatically as an editable plain text (not as a manuscript image) into the editing box at the foot of the screen seen in Figure 10.. Manuscript images are viewed and replaced in the top frame by use of the hypermedia 'buttons', now located on the left of the screen. The scroll bars enable the student to move the manuscripts, and plain text base in the editing box to enable the whole to be viewed. In my opinion the editable manuscript base in an excellent idea. It saves time, letting the student begin their edition straight away without having to copy out the content of the manuscript they chose as a base. Once the student has created his/her own edition and is happy with it, s/he can have their edition sent to them via email if they have an e-mail address (see Figure 11.). To do this they simply insert their e-mail address into the labelled box and press the hypermedia 'button' to jump to the next stage of the seminar.
Should the student be unhappy with his/her choice of base manuscript, the student can use the 'restart' button to go back enable the selection of a different base. This restart facility allows for change of mind in learning process and is very valuable in giving the student the freedom to change his/her mind and start afresh rather than having to continue with a base s/he is unhappy about working on. If the student had difficulty in working on a particular base and could not go back, motivation might decrease and the learning process would not be as effective, the student may even give up. The 'back' and 'forward' 'buttons' on the Web Browser are very valuable in this context as they allow the student to go back and reread the textual introduction and instructions should they feel the need to without losing the editing already carried out. However, this like use of the scroll bars is not particularly apparent in the seminars unless the user is familiar with the use of a Web Browser and would appear slightly differently in different browsers.
Several changes have occurred to this 'page' of the seminar (featured in Figure 10.) during the testing of this seminar to make the route through it clearer to the student. In Figure 10. the e-mail address is 'required', whereas now it is optional and allows those without email addresses to leave it blank and continue with the seminar. The 'button' marked proceed has been altered to finished editing because the previous layout of the e-mail address box and the proceed button may have encouraged users to press the button after they had filled in their e-mail address and before they had edited their edition of the poem. The instructions clearly state the order in which to do things in the textual instruction on the previous 'page' but the new finished editing button in place of the proceed button serves as a visual reminder not to press it until the editing has been finished. These changes highlight the importance of design in communicating effectively to the student, and can be seen in Figure 12.. Compare this to Figure 11. which shows the previous layout.
[screenshot of email giving 'Your Dulce et Decorum est Edition']
Clicking on the finished editing button causes an email of the students edition of the poem to be sent to his/her email address (if they filled in the address). The students edition of the poem is automatically loaded into the bottom frame of the next 'page' in an uneditable form, and a published edition (1983) of the poem by Jon Stallworthy of Oxford University is loaded into the top frame to allow the student to compare his/her edition with an authoritative published version. This can be seen in Figure 13.. Buttons on the left of the screen marked Edition and Info. The first enables the student to view Stallworthy's edition of the poem, the second to find which variant Stallworthy used as his base manuscript, comments on a problem with a particular line of the poem and information giving detailed references to the manuscripts A-D (See Figure 14.). The final 'page' has a button to enable the student to restart the seminar. Students may wish to do this to put into practice skills and knowledge learnt about the text and its problems to produce another, more informed, edition. There is also a 'button' to take the student to the seminars homepage where one can access the other seminars, as well as other resources and information about the project.
The browser Netscape 2.02 also seemed to cause problems in the last stages of the seminar. It failed to load the conclusion of the seminar and left me with what can be seen in Figure 15. instead of Figure 13..
This was very frustrating as there was no indication of how to get to the conclusion of the seminar and Figure 15. was obviously not the conclusion of the seminar from the description of the stages of the seminar found in the earlier 'pages'. I contacted the Project Officer who explained that this problem was caused by some Javascript in the header of the HTML page that the Perl script outputs (45) in the bottom right section of the screen. It was pointed out (46) that unlike Perl script which is browser independent because it runs on the server, Javascript runs on the client (via Netscape). This means that problems will inevitably occur with this last section of the seminar when an old browser is used. The Javascript causing the problem is:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> function refresh()
{parent.mss.location="http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/manuscript/choice.html"
parent.buttons.location="http://info..ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/manuscript/end.html"}
</SCRIPT>(47)
I was never able to access the conclusion to the seminar through Netscape 2.02 but was kindly sent the printed out screen and instructions by the Project Officer who also described to me how the seminar concluded. The Project Officer said that it was possible to add another way of accessing the final section of this seminar to enable older browsers to run the final stage, and that he was considering adding writing it into the seminar if time allowed (48).
This problem emphasises that new programming languages such as Java and Perl (49) cannot easily be dealt with by older software and may cause problems leading to the delivery of an inferior learning experience. As newer versions of browsers are currently freely available to download from the WWW this is perhaps not such a problem, but for inexperienced users the non-delivery of the conclusion of the seminar could be so frustrating as to put them off this type of resource. Perhaps it would be worthwhile adding a note to the 'page' listing the seminars (50) recommending the use of browsers capable of dealing with the seminars and giving examples.
The multimedia content of this seminar and the interaction with it meant that it held my attention very easily. However I found it was useful to print out the guidance given for creating an edition of the poem and have it at hand when editing my base manuscript. The seminars were clear and instructive but demanded at least a basic knowledge of windows environments and Web browsers to get the most out of them. However, with the recommendations of the Deering Report the students of today will receive increasing exposure to and training in computer technology and applications so the problem of Humanities students lacking experience in the use of networked computers should lessen over time. As expected of a JISC project such as Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature, evaluation is considered crucial to the success of the project. Pre-release, interested parties have been asked to try the seminars, accessing them over the WWW by means of passwords. They have been asked to report on such things as ease of use, appropriateness of content etc., and to report any difficulties so that they can be resolved before the public release over the WWW. After public release reaction to the seminars will continue to be monitored in a variety of ways including the comments on the discussion board, and numbers of accesses to the sites.
Chapter 3 dealt with practical design issues relating to access and communication of information in the development of independent computer assisted learning technology specifically related to the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature. Similar considerations must be taken in the design of the project's digital archive of First World War Poetry. The potential for IT to increase access to resources difficult to view in normal circumstances, such as original literary manuscripts, is huge. This chapter will discuss the creation of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project's digital archive, raising some issues of the preservation of digital information, and discussing how IT can be used to provide increased access to information through the creation such archives, and though the connection of powerful search tools with information in electronic form.
Digitisation could be defined as the reformatting of original information, such as a hand-written manuscript, into digital data through imaging where a scanner (similar to a video camera) is passed over the original to record the data. As there is no physical contact with the original, nor heat or light, the original is not harmed. The properties of the resulting images will be discussed below but the intellectual content and context of the original is retained in the digital copy using this method of reformatting. The Owen Estate granted permissions for the digitisation and use of the subsequent images of some manuscripts of Wilfred Owen in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project. It also became clear that the Estate would be willing to give permission for the digitisation of the other manuscripts for insertion into the project's proposed digital archive destined to contain resources relating to WWI poetry, to be used in research and education. This permission would only be given on condition that steps were taken in preventing unauthorised commercial exploitation of the material used. Steps used to prevent this unauthorised commercial exploitation will be discussed below.
This opportunity was an exciting prospect as the current situation meant that the original manuscripts of Wilfred Owen could not be viewed in their entirety together, preventing some variants from being compared. This was because although the English Faculty Library of Oxford University houses the largest collection of Wilfred Owen Manuscripts in the world (51), other manuscripts of the poet are held at the British Library in London and the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin so the manuscripts were separated by distance. Digitised images can be transported easily over large distances via computer networks and viewed at a location where other manuscripts are housed, enabling their comparison.
After considering the costs involved and the potential for access and preservation the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project seized the opportunity to digitise the manuscripts housed in the English Faculty Library. They also began to negotiate permissions to do the same with Owen manuscripts held in the British Library and the University of Texas in the hope of being able to present digitised images of variant manuscripts from different locations side by side to allow the comparison previously prevented by distance. Further details of the material to be published in the digital archive can be found in a paper presented to the Public Record Office (52) and from the projects home page.
This opportunity to use Owen's manuscripts in the archive led to a shift in emphasis of the proposed archive to accommodate this valuable collection of primary material. However, the intention to put additional material relating to WWI and its poetry was not discarded. At this time of writing the WWI archive is still in production but it is hoped that it will consist of mainly manuscripts and photographs from the English Faculy Library's Owen Archive, photographs from the Great War and some audio and video material from the Imperial War Museum, and some material from the Public Record Office including Owen's service records and extracts of history relating to his battalion (53). This content is reliant on gaining permission from the copyright holders and other institutions involved, material for which permission cannot be gained or afforded will not be included. Unfortunately the WWI archive is not finished at the time of writing but an impression of how a digital archive can be set up can be gained from the Rossetti Archive (54). This is available on the WWW although it is still in progress, and many of the images in it although listed are not viewable, some of the restriction is due to the wait for copyright clearance.
Libraries have traditionally understood one of their roles to be the preservation of information for future use, and certain libraries such as the British Library, and other libraries in receipt of books by legal deposit, are especially engaged in this role. There is much enthusiasm about the potential for 'digital libraries' and 'digital archives' to increase access to material for research and education. The Electronic Beowulf (55) is one example clearly demonstrating the benefits of digitisation. The only surviving manuscript was digitised to produce a complete set of high quality images which have shown alterations in the construction of the text and has been able to reconstruct lost text as well as obtaining other valuable contextual information not visible to the human eye from using different lighting techniques. The value of digitisation in recreating pages from fragments and joining fractured text was also seen in this project. However, the process of digitisation is not cheap, it was achieved at the cost of approximately £1000 per page for Electronic Beowulf. JISC has provided funding for many projects carrying out research and development in this area of information provision following the Follett Report, including the eLlib (Electronic Library) projects. This enthusiasm has been tempered by the recognition that the problems of preserving this material must be seriously considered and acted upon if we are to preserve digital information, as we preserve printed information, for future use.
In comparison to printed information, information in digital form is difficult to preserve and decays rapidly. These difficulties arise from the media on which the data is stored and the hardware and software which facilitates the use of the data. Although CD-ROMs are quite resilient and used widely for storage of digital information, all digital storage media are subject to rapid decay and if magnetic can easily be damaged by the use of inappropriate storage. As decay of digital information is not apparent from its storage media so problems could go undetected for a long time. Digital information requires hardware capable of accepting the format on which it is stored and software able to reconstruct the data contained on that format.
Advancing information and computer technology quickly leads to the obsolescence of hardware and software which can render digital data unusable. The periodic refreshing of digital information by recopying the digital data onto new media in the same format, and occasional migration to new formats where there is a danger of the previous format becoming obsolescent, are common solutions currently employed to preserve digital information. However these solutions may have to be reconsidered due to issues involved in the copying of copyrighted information. There have been suggestions that copying of copyrighted information from e.g. disk to disk, even for the purposes of refreshing data, would require copyright permission to be sought. This would be almost impossible to implement in libraries due to the cost and time involved in seeking and gaining permissions, and could cause a crisis if enforced.
One response to address the problem of the preservation of digital information was JISC's commitment of £1.5m over three years to establish the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) in 1995 (56). The AHDS seeks to address the problems of preservation and access associated with digital information and electronic resources. AHDS collects, describes, and preserves electronic resources resulting from scholarly research in the Humanities subject area, whilst at the same time promoting standards in such things as providing data description (via metadata) of this information. It provides access to these resources through an on-line catalogue designed to interoperate with other electronic finding aids (57).
At the colloquium Beyond the Classroom held in 1996 at Oxford, Dan Greenstein (the director of AHDS) defined the role of AHDS as a repository and preserver of electronic information (58). It was said that it was hoped that people involved in creating electronic teaching resources will be able to look to the AHDS for material in the same way that they do now to the standard library (59). AHDS offers support to those involved in the creation and use of computer assisted learning packages and electronic texts amongst other things. It acts as a repository for scholarly electronic resources, a resource which can be used as a source for material to be used in the creation of computer based education, as promoters of resource-creation standards and guides to good practice, as a general negotiating body with commercial publishers for copyright clearance, and preserves and documents electronic data in its care (60).
In alignment with the aims of JISC and JTAP the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature sought advice on standards for the creation of their virtual seminars and the WWI archive. This was not too difficult as both AHDS and the project are based at OUCS! The project linked up with AHDS to ensure the protection and the preservation of the archive that they are creating, but also to make it more widely available to others as a resource from which material can be drawn to create teaching and computer aided independent learning resources. The Oxford Text Archive (OTA), into which the Owen manuscript images and the transcriptions will be placed and preserved, is the most established project based at the the Humanities Computing Unit (HCU) at OUCS and is a founder member of the AHDS. Lou Burnard (61) began the archive in 1976 and has continued to build it, enabling it to demonstrate sufficient vision and expertise to be awarded JISC funding and a place in founding AHDS. This funding and position within AHDS will help it provide secure archival storage, and controlled distribution of electronic texts today, as well as ensuring that the archived texts continue to be accessible into the future (62). OTA provides access to the stored texts through a public catalogue available electronically on the Oxford Libraries Information System (OLIS), or in printed format. It is hoped that if the trial of the electronic catalogue over OLIS goes well that it will later be mounted electronically on the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) system to give much wider access to the catalogue.
Digitisation of the manuscripts in the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature involves the reformatting of the manuscripts into digital data through imaging (described briefly above). Imaging for this project was done using high quality scanning cameras and produced full colour images preserving the context of the original as well as its intellectual content. 'Blank' pages were also scanned to maintain the contextual integrity of the manuscript. The digitised images are in high quality facsimile form at the time of writing but it is intended that SGML files containing transcriptions of the images will later be associated with the images to render them 'searchable'.
The early days of digitisation saw the production of images designed only to capture the text of manuscripts, and early printed books, as the context was not considered particularly relevant. As a result the context was lost and many manuscripts are having to be redigitised as those interested in manuscript study, the history of the book, and historical bibliography require the text and the context, using money which could have been spent elsewhere. The archive once finished will be made freely available over the WWW but only in reduced size digital images in 24-bit colour at 72dpi in JPEG (63) file format to deter abuse of copyright(64). Scholars may be able to get copies of the manuscripts at archival quality once they are released (at the cost of distribution) by application to AHDS, but will be required to sign a document concerning use of the material to protect the copyright of the manuscript images and prevent their abuse (65).
A set of CD-ROMs containing archival quality digital images (full size and produced in TIFF (66) file format, at 300dpi (67), and in 24-bit colour) of all the Owen manuscripts digitised will be given to the English Faculty Library for their use. This will help to preserve the original manuscripts as many library enquiries requesting access to the original documents will be able to be fully satisfied by refering the enquirer to the CD-ROMs as they have computers powerful enough to display the images on screen at archival quality. This would lessen the handling the originals receive and therefore the damage to them. There is a high possibility that these CD-ROMs may be mounted on the Oxford University Libraries Computer Network to allow students greater access to this valuable resource through the Oxford University Libraries.
Another set of CD-ROMs will be given to Napier University, the site of Craiglockhart War Hospital. These will contain the manuscript images of The Hydra (the journal of the Craiglockhart Hospital) to which the poets Owen and Sassoon both contributed, although it has not yet been decided if the images will be of archival or on-line quality. Napier University has agreed to transcribe the manuscripts of The Hydra so that both the manuscript images and the transcriptions of them can appear in the digital archive. The transcription and encoding of the texts is important to the project to make the text searchable. Napier's transcription of the text is very helpful to the project as transcription and its proofreading is time consuming and expensive. Rekeying or transcription of hand-written material into ASCII format is will make it fully searchable, however only the intellectual content of the original will be preserved, the context of its original format will be lost. Reformatting using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can make scanned text searchable whilst preserving context and intellectual content, but it is still being developed as it is difficult to produce technology to recognise the variations in printed text, let alone hand-written text and it is not yet very accurate.
The industry has yet to develop an adequate standard vocabulary for describing the products and the different processes involved in digitisation. However, in this report the term digitisation is used to refer to the process by which printed information can be reproduced in digital form retaining both the intellectual content and context of the original in a high quality digital image which looks like a facsimile of the original. Initially the images produced of the manuscripts by digitisation are just very high quality images and the intellectual content cannot be searched as it is not machine readable. However, separate files containing transcriptions of the intellectual content of the manuscript in a format (such as SGML) can be associated with the digitised image to make it seem as if the image is searchable (in fact it is the transcribed information which is machine readable and is searched) (68). This process allows a greater flexibility in the use of the electronic information, but it is more costly and usually incurs higher costs in copyright permissions because of the facsimile quality of the image, the flexibility of use, and the increased risk of the materials misuse. Digitisation of an original manuscript provides access to its intellectual content above and beyond the capacity of the printed original whilst still able to preserve a the original context because of its facsimile form.
The need to retain the original context and intellectual content whilst making the material searchable is one reason why the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project is putting both scanned manuscript images and transcriptions of them into the archive. As approximately another 700 pages of manuscript (not including The Hydra) require be transcribed and encoded at the time of writing, the offer of such help from Napier is very welcome. At the time of writing the digitisation of the Wilfred Owen manuscripts was in process at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University and the British Library both of which have much expertise in this area. The Bodleian uses a Kontron ProgRess 3012 digital camera whilst the British Library uses a Phase 1 Plus camera with Dicomed digital scanning camera back which, in effect, acts as a 5x4 plate. All archive quality images of the manuscript will be full size and produced in TIFF file format, at 300dpi, and in 24-bit colour (69).
It is intended that the project's WWI Archive will be searchable to enable users to find resources appropriate to their need. Thumbnail images (70) might be used to allow users to sift quickly through the images of manuscripts and photographs displayed. The transcription and encoding of the manuscripts in the archive will enable manuscripts to be searched and retrieved as easily as the transcriptions. Sound files will also be transcribed and described, as will video and film clips placed in the archive (the Imperial War Museum has already described those of it's own collection and these can be used with permission). Photographs are more difficult to transcribe, at best you can only describe what they show. However, this transcription will allow the user to request a search of the entire contents of the archive for resources , for example, the words and images relating to the word mud. The searches will be able to be limited just manuscripts, or just photographs etc. This ability to search the archive is only possible through the transcription and encoding of the information contained within the archive.
It is intended that a 'Path Creation Scheme' will be available for use with the WWI archive to enable Tutors to set up 'paths' through selected material for their students to 'follow' in their own time as part of the reading to be done for a face-to-face seminar, or as part of a specially created seminar package. Students would also be able to use the scheme in linking material from the archive to their own hypermedia essays. However, this scheme is complex and may require further funding for its development, and may have to be scaled down to a simpler format if funding is unavailable.
A description of the virtual seminar An Introduction to Text Analysis (71) will follow to demonstrate how electronically encoded information can be searched in a variety of ways to retrieve an appropriate and precise response to a search request. After this there will be a discussion of how text can be made to be searchable by various means including digitisation, rekeying/transcription, and marking-up.
It is not yet clear what tools will be made available for searching the WWI archive when it is finished. However, in demonstrating the variety of searches available in this Introduction to Text Analysis seminar it is hoped that it will be clear that although the underlying programming of the search tools used will be technically demanding, the user interface will make it easy for the user to find and access resources held in the archive. This seminar uses the tool TACTweb which acts in many similar ways to a concordance, but also has the facilities to do much more. TACTweb has been been customised for use with Owen's poetry (with permission from the developers) by Paul Groves. To enable TACTweb to recognise and search Owen's poetry the text of the poems (which were marked up in SGML) had to be converted to TACT TDB format through a conversion programme called sgml2tdb (created by John Bradley). It was modified using an element programme language to enable the text to be displayed appropriately on the computer screen i.e. so that the integrity of the poems structure was not lost. TACTweb is a Web based tool with a user friendly interface (72) which does not require the user to learn how to interact with the original TACT. TACTweb is a new and experimental software which has been developed by John Bradley and Geoffrey Rockwell (73) and is based on the original text-retrieval programme TACT. TACT has been described as:
a text-retrieval program which allows the user to work with a text in order to discover the location of lexical units and internal patterns. It is therefore a potentially sophisticated tool for literary analysis, permitting investigation of the text's stylistic, grammatical and lexical features, as well as acting on the simplest level as a computerised concordance. (74)
Although the above quote is describing TACT the sentiment is equally true of TACTweb. A computer using TACTweb can search text for for the requested word/phrase etc. far more quickly than a student searching the text manually, scanning the text by eye. It may seem that the use of computer would encourage students to be lazy and reject traditional textual analysis and rely on the computer. In some cases this could happen but in this instance I believe that such an occurrence would be quite rare as care has been taken to ground the student in traditional literary skills through the first three seminars, albeit by use of the latest technology. The tool also caters for those who have not had the benefit of the previous seminar and in this case I feel the ease of use, flexibility of searching, and quick results of TACTweb would encourage them to explore the other seminars in the series (which a student can access from any seminar in the series) through which they would be introduced to other more traditional literary skills.
The design of the seminar An Introduction to Text Analysis has similarities with the others in the series (see the detailed description of companion seminar An Introduction to World War I Poetry above). Such similarities include 'pages' divided into screen length sections an introduction to the seminar, the tool and its query language, searching using the tool, the navigational icons and an explanation of their function (reinforced by graphics), good use of space, and additional helpful and relevant information (including a glossary) see Figure 16. Good practice in Web page design has been discussed above so it will not be dwelt upon here.
An Introduction to Text Analysis aims to introduce the student to text analysis in general and to the use of a particular tool developed for this purpose, TACTweb, which has been designed to be used on the WWW. The seminar offers the user several ways to search 46 of Owen's poems and 11 fragments placed in the TACT TDB database for this seminar (75). Several common search strategies are each briefly, but clearly, described with explanatory examples given in the section of the seminar entitled Searching. The searches described are:
Each of the above listed searches is introduced to the user through a description which has been tailored to the size of one screen. After each description there is a 'Try it' section which encourages the user to try out the particular search they have just read about. (These can also be used to conduct full searches of Owens poetry should a hesitant student wish to have the guidance notes on screen whilst constructing a search request.) Instructions are clearly given and the use of examples, boxes which are filled in by the user, and hypermedia 'buttons' with instructions on them make the searches easy to perform and build up the users confidence in using TACTweb's search facilities step by step. Clear textual instruction is closely connected with the examples given and guides the user through each individual search, commenting on possible uses of each search type, giving relevant examples using Owen's poetry, pointing out things to look for and in the process introducing the user to the several display options. These are:
Whichever type of display is chosen, the results are displayed clearly along with poem/fragment title or number, and line number. This information is very important in allowing the information gained to be used and referred to accurately by the student. Hypertext is used in the textual instruction to allow the user to jump quickly to displays of the example searches and to further information and extra help. Care has been taken to ensure users don't become lost in this seminar, which causes the user to constantly move between different 'pages' on the WWW. One example of this is when users are reminded through textual instructions to use the browsers 'back' button to return to their position in the seminar.
The texts of Wilfred Owens poems can be searched from the pages 'Try it' sections but a custom search page allows the student to conduct all types of search available on TACTweb from a single screen of the seminar. The need for the step by step introduction to the searches and displays is evident when one views this page (see Figure 18.). With eight decision boxes, giving the user a variety of options for each box, it could be quite daunting for the student unfamilliar with the terms, searches, and displays to encounter. However. to those familiar with TACTweb, for example those who have used the seminar before, the introduction to the searches can be quickly bypassed by clicking on the designated navigation button or using a browser bookmark to jump straight to the Custom Search page to utilise TACTweb in the textual analysis of Owen's poetry.
The needs of novice users and expert users of this seminar have also been taken into account in that the capabilities of the tool TACTweb have not been clipped to allow only introductory level use.
The seminar is set up primarily to introduce users to computer aided text analysis but the facility and the instruction is given for the user to move beyond this into advanced use of the tool. A designated navigational icon or hypertext link will take the user directly to instruction in the use of TACTweb's Query Language. Its similarity to the original TACT language is noted to inform those who have experience of this. Information is given on the basics of the language but advanced searching and refinement methods are given along with hypertext links to further help and information on these. This seminar is recommended (in the introduction to the seminars) as the last in the series, and I find it encouraging that the positioning of this seminar allows a sense of closure and achievement in itself and also encourages the student to continue in his/her exploration of the poetry he/she has been studying throughout the series of four seminars. It does this by opening up much of Owen's poetry to the student for textual analysis, and allows for progression from basic to advanced searching.
Text and images used in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project and those archived by AHDS are encoded using languages regarded as standards. This encoding allows a flexibility in the use of the digital information which aids in the preservation of the digital information, as well as enabling it to be searched by computer software programs. ASCII (76) is the international standard for representing character formats in text today but others also exist, differences between these encoding schemes for plain text can usually be overcome by mapping character sets from one format to another without loss of integrity to the character set format should it be required (77). However, although it has the major advantage of being easy to handle and readable on almost all computers, it is not suitable for maintaining the texts original context and has difficulty in dealing with non Western-European languages. UNICODE is being seen by many (78) as a possible replacement for ASCII. It can deal with characters from non-western European languages and is supported by vendors and users. However, UNICODE alone cannot deal with the complex textual information relating to the documents structure needed to preserve the context of a document (79).
Encoding languages provide a means of representing and preserving textual content embedded in layout and structure (80). Various standards exist but SGML (81), although expensive to produce, is being increasingly used in scholarly electronic publications because of its flexibility. SGML defines mark up languages, which can then encode the logical structure and content of any so-defined document (82). The texts used in the seminars were marked up in SGML (and TEI-Lite) which can be converted into other forms, such as HTML, relatively easily by using various conversion programmes (some of which are free to download from the WWW). This cuts down the costs and time involved in the project as the texts do not have to be separately marked up for different uses because they can be converted using specialist software instead.
SGML is fundamentally ASCII based so moving digital information to a different system when software/hardware advances is less of a problem e.g. SGML encoded information can be moved quite easily from VAX to UNIX. The cost of migration of SGML is currently low and since this is an important way of refreshing the information, as well as maintaining the digital information on formats which can be run from current hardware, this is an important consideration. SGML has been described as concerned only with the formal properties and interrelationships of a document, not with the semantics of markup itself or formatting (83). As such it has been found to maximise accessibility and reusability of the underlying information, a need for both AHDS and the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project.
Some presentation formats, like PDF (84), preserve both the content and context (the look and feel) of a document whatever platform is used. A document in PDF would have the same display on a PC as on an Apple Mac. PDF would seem an ideal format for access and preservation, but for several reasons which include the inflexibility in that it can only be read through the software Adobe Acrobat Reader.
At present this is not a big problem as this software is available free of charge, but should a charge be introduced enormous cost could be incurred in using the reader or having to migrate the information into another format, this cost could prevent access to information until funding is available. Currently the situation is such that although SGML is more expensive to produce than PDF, in the interests of access and flexibility SGML seems to be the most sensible format in which to store electronic information for archival and access purposes. The Commission on Preservation and Access put it more succinctly, precisely listing the issues which must be considered in selecting a storage format for digital information:
When viewed from the perspectives of the preservation community and the digital librarian, SGML appears to be the best choice for archival document storage. SGML is standardised, portable, flexible, modular, and supported by the market. SGML's support of re-usable modules and its vendor neutrality, extensibility, standarization, and ability to manage large information repositories make it an attractive choice for both archival and retrieval purposes. (85)
The fact that SGML documents are not tied to any particular format, software application, or publishing platform (86) has the disadvantage that the document may be displayed slightly when used with different software. It is possible, although expensive, to commission software to emulate the program in which the document was originally created if it is necessary for it to be displayed in its original form. However, SGML Document Type Definitions (DTDs) have been created to combat this problem, acting as as a catalog file to map entities, and a style sheet for presentation (87). The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is one DTD and has been developed (with the needs of a digital library in mind) to carry not only compound digital data but also metadata relating to those documents (88). All texts publicly available from the Oxford Text Archive are stored in SGML and the format conforms to the recommendations of TEI (89). TEI Lite could be described as the core information given in TEI and the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project has conformed to this.
Metadata could be described as descriptive information inherent in digital documents - data about data. This is potentially valuable information because it can be exploited in bibliographic control and the informed retrieval of electronic documents by using specially designed search tools. However, to achieve this the metadata needs to be described in a controlled manner. Traditional library cataloguing indicates information about an item essential to its distinction from the rest of the library stock, its descriptive elements forming the basis of an entry on a catalogue which facilitates its discovery and retrieval. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (or Dublin Core) is a way of managing large amounts of metadata found in a Web site in a controlled and useable way. Dublin Core has 15 elements: title, subject, description, creator, publisher, contributor, date, type, format, identifier, source, language, relation, coverage and rights (90). It is hoped that Dublin Core will help to provide a standardised way of supplying metadata so that pages can be searched and catalogued more easily but it also aims to provide more authoritative information, such as bibliographic information, about the Web pages to ensure the user is aware of what they are getting (91).
Project Gutenberg (92) has placed a vast quantity of texts onto the Web but it has been criticised because although the texts are easily accessible they are not easily used (e.g. by students of literature) because the authority of the texts is questionable given that it is not clear where texts have come from, which edition they are and whether or not copyright permission for use in this way has been obtained. The Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project is very aware of the need for texts to be useable as well as accessible and has taken care to provide detailed references in every case. The project is very keen to promote the use of metadata in supplying bibliographic information with electronic documents and Web sites. However, as Dublin Core is evolving through its early stages problems of currency occur. The Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project took the trouble to ensure that their homepage contained the information required for Dublin Core only to find that the mark-up used had been superseded (93). It will be updated in the near future, and may have been updated by this time of writing. The Oxford Text Archive is concerned to promote the use of standards. OTA recently held a Metadata for Electronic Texts Workshop (94) to identify metadata essential to finding electronic texts of interest to those working in the fields of literary and linguistic studies . I refer the reader to the report published on the Web for further information on this.
Copyright exists under Intellectual Property Law which is complex because it deals with intellectual property which is much harder to define than actual physical property such as a briefcase or a house. There is no inherent copyright in an intellectual idea. Copyright only comes into play when the idea is expressed in an identifiable form such as a book or an invention. Copyright gives the person who expressed their idea in such a way the right to exploit their idea and the right to redress exploitation of their idea by others. Copyright cannot prevent exploitation of the idea by others, but can enable the copyright holder to claim compensation for this. There are many rights to consider, authors, publishers, moral, public access, and no solution exists yet to satisfy all. Our society requires access to information, and the products of others ideas, to learn, advance and add to the pool of information with new ideas. There is as Oppenheim states:
a fundamental tension in intellectual property. This [is the] tension between the reward for the creator and the need for the public to gain access ... (95)
This report does not intend to try and cover all the many issues involved in the application of the laws of copyright to electronic publishing. Even intellectual property lawyers are having trouble doing this, and I am no lawyer. Instead this section will discuss specific problems, and some attempts at solutions, regarding copyright issues encountered in the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project and in the experience of AHDS. These will however reflect wider issues of copyright in an electronic age.
The copyright of the virtual seminars and the WWI archive is held by their creators but within them are texts, images, photographs, video, and even tools whose copyright is held by others (detailed above). Permission to use all copyrighted material has been secured to ensure that the seminars and archive need not fear legal action or forced alteration, which could damage the design of the seminar series as well as the initiatives which support them. Information published on the WWW as these seminars will be, are open to international access on a global scale. If a person exploits material without permission from the copyright holder of that material, and publishes it on the WWW they make it potentially available to the global community and themselves open to legal action which could be very costly given the scale of access.
The cost of obtaining permission to published copyrighted material on the WWW can vary widely in terms of time and finance. This was a consideration when the poems were selected for the seminars. Given the seminars subject and aims Stallworthy's recent scholarly edition of Owen's poetry was considered ideal but the cost of permission for using them in this way was at the time thought to be too costly for the project to consider, therefore other editions of the poetry had to be considered. Blunden's 1930s edition would have been free to use as it is out of copyright, but is considered inaccurate. After a process of elimination of the various published editions of Owen's poetry it was initially decided that the poems from Day-Lewis's 1960s edition would be used. Permission was available at reasonable cost, and the edition considered reasonably accurate.
However, it was later noted that Day-Lewis had made the editorial decision to leave some of the stanzas out of the poems and this caused problems of scholarly accuracy, particularly in a seminar series designed to introduce students to WWI poetry. Meanwhile negotiations had been in process with Stallworthy's publishers and permission was granted by Chatto & Windus for the text of Owen's poems in Stallworthy's edition to be reproduced electronically and published on the WWW. No commentary or critical notes were to be used, just the text of the poems in that edition. This was a good compromise which has benefited both parties. The project benefits from the use of a current edition regarded as accurate, and scholarly, at an affordable cost and this use will inevitably promote and further publicise Stallworthy’s edition as full references to it are given throughout the seminars.
In the seminar An Introduction to Text Analysis detailed information is given about the editions of Owen's poetry used. Under the heading Information about the text used (96) details about the edition, editor, and publisher are given, and it is stated that permission has been granted by the publisher. Indeed the seminars fully reference all copyrighted material and full references can be found immediately by the clever use of hypertext, linking for example a poem title with its full reference including line number, and edition. This is an excellent way of informing the student of the authority of the material and allows any query about sources or use of the material to be examined easily.
Use of multimedia multiplies the process of copyright clearance and permission seeking. Much time was spent in negotiating the permissions for use of the many elements used in the virtual seminars, but in most cases this has paid off. The project was fortunate to be dealing with several large bodies able to provide extensive resources rather than many smaller units each providing single units of information. The project negotiated permissions for use of copyrighted material from Jon Stallworthy and his publishers for the use of his edition of Owen's poetry, the Owen Estate, the British Library, the University of Texas for use of Owen's manuscripts, the Imperial War Museum for photographs and other material, as well as others who held resources they wished to make use of.
Copyright clearance is slow and costly and becoming increasingly complex with the growing formats of information available, and the may different holders of copyright. It is not necessarily the case that the publisher of a printed text holds the copyright to the same text in electronic form. Cambridge University Press were unable to let me see policy documents, but I was told that although the policy was currently evolving material owned by CUP would in general be licensed for electronic republication by other parties on similar terms to print republication, given adequate reassurances about security etc. of the electronic copy (97). Many with experience in negotiating permissions for the use of copyrighted material, such as librarians and those involved in JISC projects involving electronic publishing, have expressed a need for some sort of copyright clearance mechanism or agency to be established. At present there is no established copyright clearing agency one can rely on to quickly deal with such requests although this is being looked into by several JISC funded projects.
Effort is being made in finding an acceptable solution to copyright clearance. In the Higher Education community there is a lot of talk about 'fair dealing' as a defence against a copyright infringement action but this is an area subject to much misunderstanding. Fair dealing is a defence, and just a defence, not a licence to copy.
The definition of what proportion of a literary work is 'fair' to copy is difficult to define and Oppenheim advises caution in that the comparative vagueness ... means that the actual extent of fair dealing is unclear ... reinforc[ing] the monopoly position of the copyright holder (98). The Library Association concurs with this, and in a recent publication (99) advises that no text be scanned or rekeyed without permission, such can be the implications of infringement. This caution emphasises the tension that currently exists in Higher Education between satisfying the rights of the user by providing access to more information in a faster, more flexible, way through the use of existing technology, and the recognition of the rights of the copyright holder to reward for and the maintenence of integrity of his/her work.
With this in mind JISC and the Publishers Association undertook a study to consider issues relating to the clearance of rights by HEIs for the digitisation of materials originally published in print (100). The need for the specification of the format in which electronic information was to be stored was emphasised, as was the need for a more economic, and centralised, method of copyright clearance than exists at present. ERCOMS is one project seeking to address this problem currently (101). The report commented on the appointment of a copyright officer, at the eLib funded Higher Education Digitisation Centre, with interest. However, some caution was also expressed due to uncertainty over the viability of such an Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) due to the expected high overheads inevitably incurred.
A strong preference on the part of both users and copyright holders for a straight forward and brief contract for licensing the use of copyrighted information for electronic publication was noted (102). Brevity should not lead to a lack of clarity or appropriateness in the contract. The proposed 'Model Licence' (103) between UK universities and Publishers is a good example of a brief but clear contract containing a list of definitions of terms used widely within electronic publishing to ensure comprehension of the terms and conditions. AHDS also appreciate the importance of clear, brief but effective contracts to ensure the parties involved are aware of their seperate responsibilities and limitations of use. The OTA have ensured that depositors and users of electronic texts in their care sign a declaration agreeing to the set down responsibilities. However, with the recent changes in copyright law, and the increasing concern over copyright and use of electronic texts, it has been decided to review the declarations and contracts for deposit and use of texts to make them clearer and more secure.
AHDS and their lawyers are in the process of creating a 'Rights Management Framework', which hopes to include a set of contracts clearly describing the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved. These include the rights of the depositor, a statement of AHDS duties and responsibilities regarding the texts deposited with them, clauses to protect AHDS against breaches of copyright by depositors, and users responsibilities e.g. a declaration that they will not copy the text deposited with OTA and put it onto their homepage on the WWW. These legalities may seem unwieldy but they make it possible for the AHDS and other electronic archives and publishers to operate in confidence. It would be impossible for AHDS to undertake to check that every depositor had obtained appropriate copyright clearance for the text to be used in this way, so a legal declaration by the depositor of the text is necessary for the OTA to be able to accept the text. AHDS undertakes the responsibility of preserving the information deposited but to do this refreshing and eventually reformatting will be necessary. This makes it imperative that the depositor allow AHDS the right to be able to copy the text or migrate the text to another format without charge.
Some permissions for the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature were granted at generously low cost because of the educational nature of a resource and its application to research. However, certain conditions were invoked in the permissions to help protect the information from abuse. In the case of the Owen Manuscripts this included full acknowledgement to the Owen Estate at every opportunity (104) as well as digitally 'watermark[ing]' every image used in the tutorials and the digital archive confirming the copyright as owned by the Estate (105). These steps cannot prevent misuse of copyrighted material but they do ensure that ownership is obvious and traceable if material is found to have been misused.
Watermarking in information technology is the process of embedding information into an image or other document to identify its ownership. In the case of the virtual seminars and the WWI archive the watermarking technology DigiMarc by DigiMarc Corp. is used. This embeds a numeric code into the pattern of the image being marked in an indelible way, using the methods of steganography, which will remain even if the image is cut and pasted. The visibility of the watermark in the display image can be determined at the time of insertion so that it can be made to be highly visible or invisible when the image is viewed. The code of the watermark can be entered into the DigiMarc (106) web site to display the copyright details of the information containing that code. It is reported that the watermark will remain even in the event of the image being printed, and published in a printed format. Scanning the printed image will enable the watermark to be seen again and the ownership discovered (107). However, this type of technology is still fairly new and is not yet totally reliable, but it is being developed and improved so a more reliable version is anticipated. . The use of watermarking seems a good way of fixing ownership/copyright information to a document especially when it is used alongside a metadata management system such as Dublin Core to provide other important document related, e.g. bibliographic, information.
The OTA is committed to maintaining the intellectual integrity any text deposited with them. There is debate about what constitutes a change in an electronic text, due to the flexibility of the information to appear in different forms. However, moral rights of the author to have the integrity of his/her work maintained is important and observed at OTA. The flexibility of electronic text makes misrepresentation an easy danger. An example could be the use of hyperlinks in such a way that the authors work is displayed in a way which only shows one aspect of the text. For example, if a user of the Owen archive set up links to only the poetry with racist tendencies and made it available on the WWW through a web page, a user may encounter the page, follow the links and as a result of seeing only the selected texts with racist bias might see Owen as a racist poet which may not have been the case had the user seen the range of poetry he produced.
Minor alterations of text and style is a difficult issue, such tampering results in information which is different from the original, but are the differences enough to constitute an infringement? What about the digitisation of manuscripts, such as the Beowulf manuscript where fractured and missing text was recreated, can this be done whilst still maintaining the electronic version is a facsimile of the original manuscript? Linking Web pages in a different order from the original does not alter the information itself, just the context in which it is presented - is this an infringement? The OTA have encountered such difficult issues but no definitive answers have been found to apply to every case. In the early days of the OTA some publishers saw the archive as a way of advertising their printed books. However, when the same publishers began to create their own Web pages a few years later, the electronic versions of the text seemed the ideal thing to put on their pages and they wanted the texts back. Problems then occur as the parties involved state their cases and an argument often put forward in such cases by the publishers is that OTA is presenting the texts in a way which does not reflect the image of the publisher or the printed product correctly. These problems demonstrate the need for the 'Rights Management Framework' to be comprehensive and clear to close loopholes and prevent such problems in the future.
The preceding report has shown how the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature is making good use of the opportunities provided by advancing information technology and how it has responded practically and responsibly to some of the challenges involved in facilitating access to, and long-term preservation of, digital information. The release of the projects seminars will increase the access to good quality independent tuition, providing useful information on WWI poetry. The release of the WWI archive will make more easily accessible material which is difficult to access in the real world, enabling researchers to compare some manuscripts side by side for the first time, and students to access original material they would rarely have had access to as undergraduates. The seminars have been designed so that their findings can be exploited for the benefit of Higher Education, promoting good practice in design for computer assisted learning packages and enabling other to learn from their experience and even use their shells in creating further good quality literary seminars.
The project is seriously attempting to ensure the maintenance and preservation of the seminars and digitised images of the Owen manuscripts and the WWI archive by various means. These include the use of standards, approved of by the Commission for Preservation & Access, in the creation and storage of the seminars and archive, the deposit of the images and the rest of the WWI archive with the OTA at AHDS who are committed to the preservation and protection of electronic texts, and the gift of archival quality CD-ROMs to the English Faculty Library at Oxford University which could be used in answering most enquiries after the Owen manuscripts thereby protecting the originals from unnecessary handling.
Some of most effective methods currently available for protecting the copyright, and documenting the bibliographic identity, of material such as the use of Watermarking and Dublin Core, have been used by the project to protect the copyright of the seminars and archive, as well as their contents, from misuse. This also enables the authority of the copyrighted information used in the project to be checked easily. Copyright permission is clearly stated to have been obtained where appropriate, giving details, and the email contact for the Project Officer is given allowing any query to be quickly cleared up. This demonstrates the commitment of the project in the development and use of standards to connect such important information with electronic documents in a way which is both enduring and can be used to increase access through enabling this information to be searchable.
Few dispute the benefits and opportunities presented by advances in information technology but the problems of access and preservation arising from the increasing use of digital information should not be ignored. After having shown above how some of the advantages of IT can be harnessed and exploited for the benefit of preservation and access, in initiatives such as Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature, it is appropriate to expand on some of the difficulties that such use of IT raises in these same areas.
Chapter 1 outlined the changes in the UK system of Higher Education demanding a response from librarians and information providers. Those in Higher Education have turned to IT for solutions to ease the pressure in information provision and facilitating increased access to information. However this will in many ways continue the pressure. Expectations of IT continue to rise to an unrealistic level, and the increasing mass of electronic information without, as yet, a solution to the difficulties of preserving this fragile information could lead to a crisis in information provision and access.
Older generations of computer cannot provide the same high quality of image or run as sophisticated programs as the new generation of computers and this can lead to many problems in trying to access information over the WWW which has been designed for the newer generation. Provision is being made in Higher Education to increase the accessibility of appropriate computers for future student use, but it cannot be ignored that many students at present are struggling to access electronic information, particularly distance learners, because of a lack of resources and also a lack of basic IT skills, particularly in the Humanities. Initiatives like Netskills (108), in-house introductory schemes within the universities, and the new emphasis on computer skills in the National Curriculum in schools should overcome this problem in time, but at present it remains a very real problem which represents an obstacle to information access.
Chapter 2 discussed how IT, specifically virtual seminars and the WWW, could be used in the provision of information and tuition to students on site and remotely. However, the provision of information and tuition via IT is still an area of experimentation and uncertainty. One area of concern is that on-line tutorials providing only a narrow and 'potted' introduction to the subjects they address. This has issue has been addressed regarding the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project in chapter 2 above, but it is a real danger when resources created for a specific purpose are used by others unaware of the specific purpose for which the resources were created, and the limitations of the coverage. One example of this is the Rossetti archive which was initially created to serve the University of Virginia students and decrease pressure on it's library for inter-library loans on Rossetti. Others searching the WWW via a browser can also access this archive. Although this increases the resources available on the artist and poet Rossetti, the danger is that such a resource becomes the only reference source of information on this subject for the student due to the students lack of time, the unavailability of other resources, or naively. Students are often lulled into thinking that the computer contains all that they need on this particular subject, simply because they assume that because it is in electronic form it must contain all the required information. Another problem is one of authority, there is no control on resources placed on the WWW regarding quality of content and students could be unaware that all sources on the net are not equally as authoritative as traditional printed information they could access through a library.
There is concern that electronic products delivering course material and tuition will replace textbooks. In some cases I believe that IT could be used to provide better tuition than a printed textbook given the multimedia facilities, and scope for user interaction with the material, available. Photocopied course packs held in some libraries could also be effectively replaced by the 'short loan' access of such material over the University network if the copyright permission could be obtained to do this. I do not however believe that IT can adequately replace textbooks which comprise vast quantities of dense text because of the greater difficulty the human eye has with reading and assimilating material from a computer screen, the problems of health associated with long sessions in front of a computer screen, copyright issues, and the problems of cost and portability.
Chapter 3 discussed how IT could be used in the provision of information and tuition, but it was emphasised that to do this effectively much care and attention had to be paid in designing the packages to meet users needs. There is a concern that initiatives to research and develop the provision of electronic information contain hidden agendas. The worry is that although the developments give many opportunities to provide new services in information provision, and to aid and teach distance learners, the products of these initiatives may threaten the variety and range of teaching packages available and perhaps threaten the existence of tutorials, replacing the traditional but expensive face-to-face student/tutor contact at an institution with computer assisted learning packages, video links and email discussion. I believe this is a very real danger and one which must be recognised and monitored.
Computer assisted learning packages are ideal for use with distance learning support as part of a distance learning course, as a supplement to traditional teaching methods, and in further education and learning for leisure. However, independent computer assisted seminars such as those of the project Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature are not intended to, and cannot adequately fulfil, the same function as a face-to-face seminar because individual problems encountered by students cannot be immediately dealt with, points queried cannot be clarified with a tutor as there is no tutor officially connected to the seminars, remedial support is basic and confined to a glossary and navigational help, and it cannot be ensured that the student has adequately understood and engaged the subject of the seminar to the required level (109).
Chapter 4 discussed the creation of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project's digital archive, raising some issues of the preservation of digital information, and discussing how IT can be used to provide increased access to information through the creation such archives, and though the connection of powerful search tools with information in electronic form. There is concern that the navigation of electronic archives is preplanned, limiting severely the discoveries made by natural curiosity because the user must rely on the data map and the information given by the computer, perhaps limiting the options only to the most obvious comparisons. Searching of digital archives may be limited by the features of a search tool, but it must be remembered that such archives, like the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project's WWI archive, can give access to material which was difficult or impossible to access in the first place due to distance or restriction on access. The opportunities for increased textual analysis through IT tools such as TACTweb, which would be extremely difficult and time consuming to achieve manually, are exciting and one example of how IT can add value to traditional methods of teaching and research. The association of encoded textual transcription of manuscripts with the digitised images of the original manuscripts to render them 'searchable' is very useful to the study of English Literature and I am sure it has led and will lead to further textual discoveries as researchers are able to apply search tools and compare different manuscript variants electronically.
The digitisation of manuscripts for preservation purposes is an excellent method of providing access to this information which is usually held under restricted access and useful for the preservation of the intellectual context and content of originals. It can also be used as a substitute for the original in answering many library enquiries, helping to prevent unnecessary handling of the original. Digitisation demonstrates a very positive side of the use of IT in access and preservation. It's potential to make things invisible to the naked eye visible by computer enhancement, and the manipulation of manuscript fragments to make a whole image, is very valuable. One example of this is the Beowulf erasures which were found during the digitisation of the manuscript by the British Library. The digitisation of the manuscript enabled the study of the palimpsest (work on MS rubbed out and then the MS is used again) to see what was there before or what was changed. Without digitisation this new information may not have been revealed. The use of IT for digitisation of originals for the study of palimpsest is exciting and could be used in furthering the study of manuscripts as well as paintings whose canvases were also often painted over and reused. The production of archival quality images on CD-ROM is not cheap however, and obtaining funding and permission to digitise material of value can be a huge obstacle.
However, digital information resulting from the process of digitisation is subject to all the problems of preservation that other digital information is subject to, and therefore problematical regarding the security of its long-term preservation. Advances and recommendations of suitable storage formats have been made by authorities such as the Commission for Preservation & Access but no real long-term solution to the problems of preserving digital information has yet been found, and research into this matter is continuing as a matter of priority. Initiatives such as AHDS provide an immediate solution to the problem in agreeing to refresh and migrate the information deposited with them when necessary to preserve the information for as long as it continues to exist. AHDS hopes to become a JISC core service giving it increased security through maintained funding, however should funding be withdrawn there would be a serious problem, and the AHDS may not be in a position in which to continue to preserve the electronic information deposited with it.
The OTA ran for a couple of decades supported by Oxford University, and should the funding for AHDS run out, the support of the AHDS may be in the University's and the Bodleian library's interest should the electronic publication of texts become the norm without a legal deposit requirement being laid upon them, or simply to continue research. If no support was forthcoming the possibility of joining up with commercial interests such as a large publisher of electronic texts for the library market, like Chadwyck-Healey, would have to be considered to generate funds but this could be problematical given the conditions in documents relating to the use of texts deposited with AHDS. If this failed an attempt might be made to split the collection and house the different sections with other interested initiatives or libraries, but this would not be ideal.
The implications of the loss of funding on such initiatives in the preservation of electronic information are not pleasant but must be considered, and disaster plans made if the preservation of the deposited information is to be continued should the worst occur. If a book was left untouched in a cupboard for 100 years it would probably still be readable, we have many examples of very old manuscripts and printed books which have survived until today. However, if the book was replaced with a computer disk containing an electronic text in the same situation it would be very unlikely that it would be readable due to the speed of obsolescence of format, software and hardware. Today we have trouble reading electronic information stored in formats current even ten years ago. This is a huge problem and initiatives like AHDS should be set up with care but as long-term commitments with maintained funding to ensure the adequate long-term preservation of electronic texts.
Copyright and electronic information is currently a minefield for both users and information providers. Intellectual property law is being debated internationally to try and find answers to the problems regarding electronic information and copyright (110). Recent changes such as the 1993 European Directive have led to further confusion in the conditions of copyright and fair use. The extension of the term of protection of copyright, for authors of literary works, in the UK from 50 years after the authors death to 70 (111), seems to have caused most disruption in the scholarly world, forcing the delay of planned scholarly editions of works just coming into the public domain at the time by 20 years!. The use of Watermarking, and Metadata management tools such as Dublin Core, can help fix ownership information to electronic information in an enduring way but this is by no means perfected yet and needs further study.
Another problem relating to the lack of ownership information such as date and author is very relevant to this report - the difficulty of citation of electronically published information. Many of the sites I have referred to are undated and/or it is unclear who the author is. As a consequence I have simply provided the name and the URL of the site mentioned. This raises huge problems regarding accuracy and fraud. I know I visited the listed sites but in a years time, or even tomorrow, the sites may have been moved, removed, or altered causing the information I have referred to in the URLs listed to no longer exist. Downloading information from the Web onto a floppy disc has been suggested by some but the copyright implications of this action are vague, and in this case caution is wise. How then am I to prove that the information I cite existed?
I encountered this problem myself when revisiting the British Library Web Site to check information regarding the Electronic Beowulf. The site had been upgraded and the new site did not work due to a problem regarding the sophisticated programming language used in its creation. As a result I was unable to obtain the information I had viewed on the original British Library Web site and had to resort to trying to access the information from an American site which luckily had not been upgraded and I found the information I was searching for. There are many suggestions for the citation of electronically published information but no standards. This is an area which must be further researched to enable the production of standards and guidelines in this area. The adoption of Dublin Core as a standard would help by providing bibliographical information which could be used in the citations. As use of electronic information in the academic world increases this problem will worsen and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
A major problem of copyright and digital information continues to be the definition of when an electronic document has been changed significantly enough to make it a different document. There is a problem of multiple editions existing on the Web due to mirroring and linking with updating happening rarely, if at all, is very apparent. This is a major disadvantage of using the WWW for dissemination of information. AHDS requires documents to be re deposited with them should a change occur. AHDS document the changes and list the differing editions but they continue to maintain the current and previous editions. This is important in the preservation of information.
This report has discussed the potential of electronic publishing to provide answers to some of the problems of access and preservation of information encountered by Higher Education Institutions and their libraries in the UK. The case study of the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature has demonstrated how the use of IT can facilitate access to information and also add value to that information. It has been seen that copyright issues lie at the centre of accessibility of information, the technology exists to transform original manuscripts into searchable digital facsimile images which can sent across the world in minutes, but this cannot be done legally without permission which can be difficult to obtain. To exploit this technology for the benefit of access some central system of copyright clearance needs to be found and is several methods are currently being tried out through JISC funded projects, the results are eagerly awaited. Digitisation can help in the preservation of original manuscripts by providing surrogates lessening the necessity for the handling of the originals but ironically solutions to the problems of ensuring the preservation of this digital information have not yet been found. It is anticipated that the JISC initiatives in process will go some way towards finding appropriate solutions to problems discussed above. However, it seems true to say that:
The influx of electronic communications and information processing technologies, abetted by the steady improvement of the micro processor, has rapidly brought on a condition of critical mass. ... The stable hierarchies of the printed page - one of the defining norms of the world - are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits. (112)
We have been in a similar situation before. The 16th Century saw anarchy in the book trade. No one knew what had been published because no catalogues existed and the Frankfurt Book fair had not been thought of. There was no communication between the major book centres such as Venice and Paris, and all was confusion. So what was the solution? Catalogues, well a bibliography by Conrad Gessner (113).
Our information society is currently suffering a similar confusion due to the vast quantity of information of varying authority and use available to computer users via the Internet and the World Wide Web. We have the technology to publish internationally in electronic form but we must now consider how we can ensure that people will be able to access this information in a way which allows them to find appropriate and authoritative information in a time/cost effective way. Search engines are useful but work in different ways and vary in terms of number and accuracy of hit. An important consideration is that many sites are not registered on each or any search engine and therefore are unable to be found by using the engines. Most people using the net use the engines as their sole navigator on the net and so would never find any sites not registered.
Librarians have preserved information for hundreds of years, guiding users to the information they request. The introduction of digital information in addition to the hand-written, and printed information presents a challenge but it is a challenge that can be seized as an opportunity for access and preservation of information in general. There has been a concern that with the advent of the WWW allowing anyone with the required hardware and software to gain access to and publish information on an international scale that either the librarian or the publisher would be made redundant. It is apparent from the confusion of information on the WWW that both a Librarians skills and those of a Publisher are still required in this area to add value to the information and guide users through the confusion. Librarians in Higher Education are also undertaking an increasing role in user support where IT has been introduced in most libraries.
It is an exciting time of great change and opportunity, and one in which the combination of IT skills with traditional library skills will help develop solutions to overcome the problems the information world is currently experiencing. The opportunities presented by IT for information provision are many and should be seized, but caution should be applied with a thought for the long-term preservation of information and the dangers should not be ignored. The solution to the problem of the unrecorded mass of information out there? Perhaps the implication of standards such as Dublin Core to record (and enable accurate searching of) the unique combination of ownership and bibliographic information relating to electronic documents, in fact the modern application of the elements involved in librarianship and bibliography.
(1) Electronic publishing is used here to mean the production or reformatting of information into electronic form, published on CD-ROM or on the WWW.
(2) Whitaker 'UK statistics - book prices and output', Bookseller, 26 July 1996, p.16.
(3) See Web site:
URL: http://jstor.umdl.umich.edu/about/pricing.htm
(4) Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group: Report; Chairman, Sir Brian Follett. Bristol, Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFC), 1993. ('The FOLLETT Report').
(5) Joint Funding Councils' Libraries
Review Group: Report of the Group on a National/Regional Strategy for
Library Provision for Researchers; Chairman, Professor Michael Anderson.
1995. ('The ANDERSON Report').
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/other/anderson
(6) National Committee of Inquiry into
Higher Education: Higher Education in the learning society; Chairman, Sir
Ron Dearing. 1997. ('The DEARING Report').
URL: http://wwwd2.leeds.ac.uk/ncihe/docsinde.html
(7) See eLib projects at:
URL: http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/elib/
(8) As a SCONUL trainee Sept 1995-Sept1996.
(9) Lee, Stuart D. A case study: teaching on the WWW - Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches', SIMA Report Series, 18, March 1995.
(10) eLib workshop - On demand publishing in the Humanities, 2nd May 1997, & University College London. Beyond the library Colloquium, 16th May 1997, Oxford University.
(11) Head of the Oxford Text Archive.
(12) Joint Funding Councils' Libraries
Review Group: Report; Chairman, Sir Brian Follett. Bristol, Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFC), 1993. ('The FOLLETT
Report'). Paragraph 28-29.
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/follett_report.html
(13) Joint Funding Councils' Libraries
Review Group: Report; Chairman, Sir Brian Follett. Bristol, Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFC), 1993. ('The FOLLETT
Report'). Paragraph 28.
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/follett_report.html
(14) Virtual Seminars for Teaching
Literature Project Proposal
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/proposal.html
(15) Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day
in the Trenches' virtual seminar
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/rose/hyppoem.html
(16) Joint Information Systems Committee Exploiting information systems in higher education: an issues paper. URL:http://www.jtap.ac.uk/JISC/JISC-Issues.html
(17) Based on information given in
Project Proposal available at
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/proposal.html
(18) Budget is detailed in the Project
Proposal
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/proposal.html
(19) URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/tutorials/intro/intro.html
(20) URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/tutorials/intro/intro.html
(21) URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/tutorials/intro/intro.html
(22) Besser, Howard & Bonn, Maria 'Impact of distance independent education' Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1996, 47 (11), pp.881.
(23) Besser, Howard 'Issues and challenges for the distance independent environment' Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1996, 47 (11), pp.818.
(24) Project Proposal:
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/proposal.html
(25) Joint Information Systems Committee
Exploiting information systems in higher education: an issues paper,
glossary.
URL:http://www.jtap.ac.uk/JISC/JISC-Issues.html
(26) Ibrahim, Bertrand & Franklin, Stephen D. 'Advanced educational uses of the world wide web' Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1995, 27, pp.871.
(27) Harris Central Library (Preston) charge £3 per half hour, £5 for 1 hour, and limit access to 4 hours (as they do for the microfiche reader). Disks used must be those bought from the library to help prevent virus contamination of the computer, at £1 per disk, and once removed from the library cannot be brought back in. Printing is also charged for. Internet users are not able to access all sites as the library run the programme Cyberpatrol to block undesirable sites, such as those delivering porn, but sites can be unblocked at the librarians discretion. Internet access is also available at the same cost from other sites around the Preston area such as the main public library in Leyland, Blackburn, Lancaster, Burnley, Morcambe, Fleetwood, and Blackpool . Information based on that gained from a telephone conversation with Caren Howarth, Senior Library Assistant, Harris Central Library, Preston Division, Market Square, Preston, PR1 2PP. 9.30am, 28/08/97.
(28) Definitions based on those found in
Joint Information Systems Committee Exploiting information systems in
higher education: an issues paper, glossary.
URL: http://www.jtap.ac.uk/JISC/JISC-Issues.html
(29) Lee, Stuart D. A case study: teaching on the WWW - Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches', SIMA Report Series, 18, March 1995, pp.14.
(30) Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature Project Manager
(31) Lee, Stuart D. A case study: teaching on the WWW - Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches', SIMA Report Series, 18, March 1995, pp.19.
(32) Project Proposal:
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/proposal.html
(33) Based on Riley, F. H. Developing
multimedia courseware book - download University of Hull, 1995,
2.1.Multimedia and Hypermedia.
URL: http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/ITTI/bk_dnld.html
(34) Riley, F. H. Developing
multimedia courseware book - download University of Hull, 1995,
2.1.Multimedia and Hypermedia.
URL: http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/ITTI/bk_dnld.html
(35) Lee, Stuart D. A case study: teaching on the WWW - Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches', SIMA Report Series, 18, March 1995.
(36) I was able to access the seminars (via use of a password) in their pre-release form several times during August 1997.
(37) An Introduction to World War I
Poetry virtual seminar
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/intro/
(38) Besser, Howard 'Issues and challenges for the distance independent environment' Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1996, 47 (11), pp.818.
(39) Riley, F. H. Developing
multimedia courseware book - download University of Hull, 1995,
2.1.Multimedia and Hypermedia, pp.5-6.
URL: http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/ITTI/bk_dnld.html
(40) Due to distance or access restrictions due to reasons of security and preservation.
(41) Based on information in an email to Jenny Haigh, from Michael Popham 30/07/97.
(42) National Committee of Inquiry into
Higher Education: Higher education in the learning society;
Chairman, Sir Ron Dearing. 1997. ('The DEARING Report'). Recommendation
46.
URL: http://wwwd2.leeds.ac.uk/ncihe/docsinde.html
(43) University College London.
(44) I contacted the Project Officer who also informed me that they don't work in Internet Explorer 3 either. He intends to add the letter of the manuscript at the top of each manuscript set to ensure users can easily see which manuscript versions they are veiwing. Information based on that in email sent to Jenny Haigh from Paul Groves 10/9/97.
(45) email from Paul Groves to Jenny Haigh 10/9/97.
(46) email from Paul Groves to Jenny Haigh 10/9/97.
(47) email from Paul Groves to Jenny Haigh 10/9/97.
(48) email from Paul Groves to Jenny Haigh 10/9/97.
(49) Practical Extraction and Report Language
(50) URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/
(51) Groves, Paul First world war poetry: an example of a digital archive Oxford University Computing Services, February 1997, pp.3.
(52) Groves, Paul First world war poetry: an example of a digital archive Oxford University Computing Services, February 1997, pp.5-6.
(53) Groves, Paul First world war poetry: an example of a digital archive Oxford University Computing Services, February 1997, pp.5.
(54) The D. G. Rossetti hypermedia
archive
URL: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/fullarch.html
(55) For more information see: Ansell,
Janet Electronic Beowulf on World Wide Web
URL: http://www.cc.ubc.ca/ccandc/jan95/beowulf.htm
Kiernan, Kevin K. The Electronic Beowulf
URL: http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/BL/CIL.html
also: http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/welcome.html
(56) Greenstein, Dan & Trant,
Jennifer AHDS: Arts and Humanities Data Service
URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds/intro.html
(57) Based on information given in
Greenstein, Dan & Trant, Jennifer AHDS: Arts and Humanities Data
Service
URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue4/ahds/intro.html
(58) Beyond the classroom - the arts and
humanities data service
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/events/beyond/dan.html
(59) Beyond the classroom - the arts and
humanities data service
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/events/beyond/dan.html
(60) Based on information given in:
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/events/beyond/dan.html
(61) Lou Burnard is Manager of OUCS
Hunanities Computing Unit, Co-editor of the TEI Guidelines, and founder of
the Oxford Text Archive at Oxford University
URL: http://sable.ox.ac.uk/ota/reports/metarep
1.html
(62) Based on information given in HCU
Mission Statement
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/mission.html
(63) A method of the compression of digitised images by selectively discarding information to which our eyes are relatively insensitive. Joint Photographic Experts Group.
(64) Based on information given in email sent by Michael Popham to Jenny Haigh 31/07/97.
(65) Based on information given in email sent by Michael Popham to Jenny Haigh 31/07/97.
(66) Tagged Image Format File
(67) dots per inch
(68) Based on information in email sent to Jenny Haigh by Paul Groves 12/9/97.
(69) Information on cameras and image specification based on information in e-mail sent by Michael Popham to Jenny Haigh 31/07/97.
(70) For examples see those in the Rossetti
Archive
URL: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/rossetti/translations/1-1861troxdoccom.html
(71) URL: http://paulg.oucs.ox.ac.uk/tactweb/
(72) Adapted, with permission from its designer Alex Stevens, by Paul Groves.
(73) TACTweb Homepage giving more
information on TACTweb and it's developers can be found at
URL: http://tactweb.humanities.mcmaster.ca/
(74) Armstrong, Guyda, Computer-assisted
literary analysis using the TACT text-retrieval program Computers &
Texts, 11, March 1996, pp.8-11.
URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct11/armstron.html
(75) Information about the text used
URL: http://paulg.oucs.ox.ac.uk/tactweb/
(76) American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(77) Based on information given in:
The commission on preservation and access and the research Libraries
Group, Inc. Preseving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on
Archiving of Digital Information, 1 May 1996, pp.10.
(78) And reported as a possible replacement for ASCII by the commission on preservation and access in The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp5.
(79) Based on information in The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp5.
(80) The commission on preservation and access and the research Libraries Group, Inc. Preseving digital information: report of the task force on archiving of digital information, 1 May 1996, pp.11.
(81) Standard Geneealized Markup Language
(82) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.9.
(83) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.9.
(84) Adobe Portable Document Format
(85) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.24.
(86) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.9.
(87) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.15.
(88) The commission on preservation and access SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access, July 1997, pp.16.
(89) Further information on TEI and TEI
Lite (the distilled core information of TEI) can be found from:
TEI
Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange
URL: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/teilite
Oxford Text Archive page
URL: http://sable.ox.ac.uk/ota/pubftp.html
The printed TEI guidelines reference is:
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. &
Burnard, Lou (Eds) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding: Text
Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3), 1990-1994.
(90) Dublin Core Management URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin
(91) Based on information given in email 26/8/97 to Jenny Haigh from Paul Groves.
(92) A growing archive of electronic
texts available on the WWW
URL: http://promo.net/pg/
(93) Based on information given in email 26/8/97 to Jenny Haigh from Paul Groves.
(94) Metadata for Electronic Texts
Workshop Report, 2nd May 1997, Oxford.
URL: http://sable.ox.ac.uk/ota/reports/metarep1.html
(95) Oppenheim, Charles 'Copyright in the
electronic age' in Parrinder, Patrick, and Chernaik, Warren Textual
monopolies: literary copyright and the public domain, Oxford :
Office for Humanities Communication Publication, 8, 1997, pp.97.
(96) URL: http://paulg.oucs.ox.ac.uk/tactweb/
(97) email to Jenny Haigh from Kevin Taylor (CUP) 29/8/97.
(98) Oppenheim, Charles 'Copyright in the electronic age' in Parrinder, Patrick, and Chernaik, Warren Textual monopolies: literary copyright and the public domain, Oxford : Office for Humanities Communication Publication, 8, 1997, pp.124.
(99) Norman, Sandy Copyright in Further Education and Higher Education Libraries, London : Library Association, 1996.
(100) JISC/PA Copyright clearance
and digitisation in UK higher education: supporting study for the JISC/PA
clearance mechanisms working party, 1(1).
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/clearance
(101) ERCOMS - Electronic reserve
copyright management system
URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/ercoms/
(102) JISC/PA Copyright clearance
and digitisation in UK higher education: supporting study for the JISC/PA
clearance mechanisms working party, 5.
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/clearance
(103) JISC & PA Working Party Proposed
'model licence' between UK universities and publishers, July 1997.
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/licence/intro.html
(104) Letter from Stuart Lee to Owen Estate regarding use of Owen Manuscripts 29/1/97.
(105) Letter from Stuart Lee to Owen Estate regarding use of Owen Manuscripts 29/1/97.
(106) DigiMarc URL: http://www.digimarc.com
(107) URL: http://www.netscapeworld.com/netscapeworld/nw-03-1997/nw-o3-watermark.html
(108) Netskills is an initiative
promoting computer network skillis in the UK Higher Education Community.
Further information can be found on its Web Page
URL: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/
(109) Includes some aspects of the
teaching and learning process identified by the MacFarlane Report referred
to in Joint Information Systems Committee Exploiting information
systems in higher education: an issues paper, paragraph 82.
URL:
http://www.jtap.ac.uk/JISC/JISC-Issues.html
(110) See the Web Page of WIPO - the
World Intellectual Property Organisation for further details.
URL:
http://www.wipo.org/eng/index.html
(111) Sherman, Brad & Bently, Lionel 'Balance and harmony in the duration of copyright: the European Directive and its consequences' Parrinder, Patrick, and Chernaik, Warren Textual monopolies: literary copyright and the public domain, Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publication, 8, 1997, pp.15-37.
(112) Birkerts, Sven The Gutenberg elegies London : Faber & Faber, 1996, pp.3.
(113) Information based on discussion between Professor R. C. Alston and Jenny Haigh, 17/7/97.
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