CALALUCA rehearsed his role as a publisher or, better, as an intermediary
between what is viewed as a sound idea and the people who would make use
of it. Finding the specialist to advise in this process is the core of
that function. The publisher must monitor and hug the fine line between
giving users what they want and suggesting what they might need. One
responsibility of a publisher is to represent the desires of scholars and
research librarians as opposed to bullheadedly forcing them into areas
they would not choose to enter.
CALALUCA likened the questions being raised today about data structure
and standards to the decisions faced by the Abbe Migne himself during
production of the Patrologia series in the mid-nineteenth century.
Chadwyck-Healey's decision to reproduce Migne's Latin series whole and
complete with SGML tags was also based upon a perceived need and an
expected use. In the same way that Migne's work came to be far more than
a simple handbook for clerics, PLD is already far more than a database
for theologians. It is a bedrock source for the study of Western
civilization, CALALUCA asserted.
In regard to the decision to produce and publish PLD, the editorial board
offered direct judgments on the question of appropriateness of these
texts for conversion, their encoding and their distribution, and
concluded that the best possible project was one that avoided overt
intrusions or exclusions in so important a resource. Thus, the general
decision to transmit the original collection as clearly as possible with
the widest possible avenues for use led to other decisions: 1) To encode
the data or not, SGML or not, TEI or not. Again, the expected user
community asserted the need for normative tagging structures of important
humanities texts, and the TEI seemed the most appropriate structure for
that purpose. Research librarians, who are trained to view the larger
impact of electronic text sources on 80 or 90 or 100 doctoral
disciplines, loudly approved the decision to include tagging. They see
what is coming better than the specialist who is completely focused on
one edition of Ambrose's De Anima, and they also understand that the
potential uses exceed present expectations. 2) What will be tagged and
what will not. Once again, the board realized that one must tag the
obvious. But in no way should one attempt to identify through encoding
schemes every single discrete area of a text that might someday be
searched. That was another decision. Searching by a column number, an
author, a word, a volume, permitting combination searches, and tagging
notations seemed logical choices as core elements. 3) How does one make
the data available? Tieing it to a CD-ROM edition creates limitations,
but a magnetic tape file that is very large, is accompanied by the
encoding specifications, and that allows one to make local modifications
also allows one to incorporate any changes one may desire within the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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