Those converting PLD also tried to avoid the sins of omission, that is,
excluding portions of the collections or whole sections. What about the
images? PLD is full of images, some are extremely pious
nineteenth-century representations of the Fathers, while others contain
highly interesting elements. The goal was to cover all the text of Migne
(including notes, in Greek and in Hebrew, the latter of which, in
particular, causes problems in creating a search structure), all the
indices, and even the images, which are being scanned in separately
searchable files.
Several North American institutions that have placed acquisition requests
for the PLD database have requested it in magnetic form without software,
which means they are already running it without software, without
anything demonstrated at the Workshop.
What cannot practically be done is go back and reconvert and re-encode
data, a time-consuming and extremely costly enterprise. CALALUCA sees
PLD as a database that can, and should, be run under a variety of
retrieval softwares. This will permit the widest possible searches.
Consequently, the need to produce a CD-ROM of PLD, as well as to develop
software that could handle some 1.3 gigabyte of heavily encoded text,
developed out of conversations with collection development and reference
librarians who wanted software both compassionate enough for the
pedestrian but also capable of incorporating the most detailed
lexicographical studies that a user desires to conduct. In the end, the
encoding and conversion of the data will prove the most enduring
testament to the value of the project.
The encoding of the database was also a hard-fought issue: Did the
database need to be encoded? Were there normative structures for encoding
humanist texts? Should it be SGML? What about the TEI--will it last,
will it prove useful? CALALUCA expressed some minor doubts as to whether
a data bank can be fully TEI-conformant. Every effort can be made, but
in the end to be TEI-conformant means to accept the need to make some
firm encoding decisions that can, indeed, be disputed. The TEI points
the publisher in a proper direction but does not presume to make all the
decisions for him or her. Essentially, the goal of encoding was to
eliminate, as much as possible, the hindrances to information-networking,
so that if an institution acquires a database, everybody associated with
the institution can have access to it.
CALALUCA demonstrated a portion of Volume 160, because it had the most
anomalies in it. The software was created by Electronic Book
Technologies of Providence, RI, and is called Dynatext. The software
works only with SGML-coded data.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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