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Rah Rah Rah for Literature Online: IU, BIG TEN LIBRARIES LEAD PROJECT
Indiana University Libraries will lead athree-year cooperative project among Big Ten universities to digitize nearly3,000 works of 19th century American fiction. The resulting collection ofelectronic texts will be freely available via the World Wide Web.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851-1875, the digitized works will 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 18th and 19th 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," said 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.
IU Libraries staff will convert 800,000 microfilm page images to text files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and they will 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 at IU, Michigan State University, the Ohio State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of Iowa; the University of Michigan; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Wisconsin at 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's and Cornell University's Making of America, which covers the period between 1850 and 1877 but excludes fiction.
IU has considerable experience digitizing important literature. The IU-based Victorian Women Writers Project, a source for 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 more information, go to the IU Library website.