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Indiana University Libraries Lead Project to Digitize American Fiction
03/01/2000
March 2000
Indiana University Libraries Lead Project to Digitize American Fiction
Indiana University Libraries will lead a three-year cooperative project among Big Ten universities to digitize nearly 3,000 works of nineteenth-century American fiction. The resulting collection of electronic texts will be freely available via the World Wide Web.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851-1875, the works include novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, and allegories. This bibliography is part of Wright’s three-volume work listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, which is considered the best bibliography of American adult fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It includes famous authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Herman Melville, as well as many lesser known or forgotten authors.
"This was a momentous period in American history," says Perry Willett, bibliographer for English and American literature and coordinator of this digitization project, "but American literature was still in its infancy. A searchable electronic collection will provide insight into American culture, literature, and history otherwise unattainable." Researchers, for example, will be able to search by keyword the entire texts of the 2,832 digitized works.
Indiana University Libraries staff will convert 800,000 microfilm page images to text files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and create a searchable database of the texts. Participating research libraries will edit, encode, and proofread the text files.
The nine libraries working on this project are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago. The participating libraries are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, The Ohio State University, University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; The University of Iowa; University of Michigan; University of Minnesota; and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In their first cooperative and jointly funded digital project, the CIC member institutions will share expertise in the three-year effort and make significant works of American literature available to scholars worldwide.
The collection from this 25-year period dovetails neatly with a number of other large electronic text collections, including Chadwyck-Healey’s Early American Fiction, which ends at 1850, and the University of Michigan and Cornell’s Making of America, which covers 1850-77 but excludes fiction.
Indiana University has considerable experience digitizing important literature. The IU-based Victorian Women Writers Project, a source for the works by British women from the Victorian period, was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of the best humanities sites on the World Wide Web and rated "superior" by Britannica.com, the web site of Encyclopedia Britannica.
For further information, visit the Web site : http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/wright or contact: Eric Bartheld (812) 856-4817 or ebarthel@indiana.edu.
Indiana University Libraries Lead Project to Digitize American Fiction
Indiana University Libraries will lead a three-year cooperative project among Big Ten universities to digitize nearly 3,000 works of nineteenth-century American fiction. The resulting collection of electronic texts will be freely available via the World Wide Web.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851-1875, the works include novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, and allegories. This bibliography is part of Wright’s three-volume work listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, which is considered the best bibliography of American adult fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It includes famous authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Herman Melville, as well as many lesser known or forgotten authors.
"This was a momentous period in American history," says Perry Willett, bibliographer for English and American literature and coordinator of this digitization project, "but American literature was still in its infancy. A searchable electronic collection will provide insight into American culture, literature, and history otherwise unattainable." Researchers, for example, will be able to search by keyword the entire texts of the 2,832 digitized works.
Indiana University Libraries staff will convert 800,000 microfilm page images to text files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and create a searchable database of the texts. Participating research libraries will edit, encode, and proofread the text files.
The nine libraries working on this project are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago. The participating libraries are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, The Ohio State University, University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; The University of Iowa; University of Michigan; University of Minnesota; and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In their first cooperative and jointly funded digital project, the CIC member institutions will share expertise in the three-year effort and make significant works of American literature available to scholars worldwide.
The collection from this 25-year period dovetails neatly with a number of other large electronic text collections, including Chadwyck-Healey’s Early American Fiction, which ends at 1850, and the University of Michigan and Cornell’s Making of America, which covers 1850-77 but excludes fiction.
Indiana University has considerable experience digitizing important literature. The IU-based Victorian Women Writers Project, a source for the works by British women from the Victorian period, was recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of the best humanities sites on the World Wide Web and rated "superior" by Britannica.com, the web site of Encyclopedia Britannica.
For further information, visit the Web site : http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/wright or contact: Eric Bartheld (812) 856-4817 or ebarthel@indiana.edu.
