News & Events
Digital Library Program Launches Wright American Fiction Project
01/01/2002
January 2002
Digital Library Program Launches Wright American Fiction Project
More than 1,700 works of nineteenth-century American Fiction are now online and fully searchable, thanks to a cooperative digitization project of Big Ten university libraries.
Freely available via the World Wide Web at www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/, the project provides a groundbreaking research aid to scholars around the country and the world, who can now search full-text works of American fiction and view images online.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his landmark 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851-1875, the digitized works include novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, and allegories. The 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.
"This project gives a full picture of what was published during this period in American history," says project director Perry Willett. "It's our heritage."
Having at least skimmed all of the novels, Willett points to the quantity of deeply religious material and repeated use of regional and ethnic dialects. "The authors were trying to capture an American voice," Willett says, chuckling, "but it really messes up the spellchecks."
The project, still underway, involves a complex series of steps, including digitizing the microfilm, converting more than 400,000 page images to text, correcting any errors resulting from the optical character recognition software, and creating the search feature.
Wright's bibliography contains nearly 3,000 works, so the project is over half finished. Authors included are from the first half of the alphabet and include Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving.
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. Indiana University's Digital Library Program is the project host.
The participating institutions 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.
Digital Library Program Launches Wright American Fiction Project
More than 1,700 works of nineteenth-century American Fiction are now online and fully searchable, thanks to a cooperative digitization project of Big Ten university libraries.
Freely available via the World Wide Web at www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/, the project provides a groundbreaking research aid to scholars around the country and the world, who can now search full-text works of American fiction and view images online.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his landmark 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851-1875, the digitized works include novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, and allegories. The 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.
"This project gives a full picture of what was published during this period in American history," says project director Perry Willett. "It's our heritage."
Having at least skimmed all of the novels, Willett points to the quantity of deeply religious material and repeated use of regional and ethnic dialects. "The authors were trying to capture an American voice," Willett says, chuckling, "but it really messes up the spellchecks."
The project, still underway, involves a complex series of steps, including digitizing the microfilm, converting more than 400,000 page images to text, correcting any errors resulting from the optical character recognition software, and creating the search feature.
Wright's bibliography contains nearly 3,000 works, so the project is over half finished. Authors included are from the first half of the alphabet and include Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving.
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. Indiana University's Digital Library Program is the project host.
The participating institutions 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.
