Commenting on FLEISCHHAUER's assertion that AM was looking more at
searching ideas than words, MYLONAS argued that without words an idea
does not exist. FLEISCHHAUER conceded that he ought to have articulated
his point more clearly. MYLONAS stated that they were in fact both
talking about the same thing. By searching for words and by forcing
people to focus on the word, the Perseus Project felt that they would get
them to the idea. The way one reviews results is tailored more to one
kind of user than another.
Concerning the total volume of material that has been processed in this
way, AM at this point has in retrievable form seven or eight collections,
all of them photographic. In the Macintosh environment, for example,
there probably are 35,000-40,000 photographs. The sound recordings
number sixty items. The broadsides number about 300 items. There are
500 political cartoons in the form of drawings. The motion pictures, as
individual items, number sixty to seventy.
AM also has a manuscript collection, the life history portion of one of
the federal project series, which will contain 2,900 individual
documents, all first-person narratives. AM has in process about 350
African-American pamphlets, or about 12,000 printed pages for the period
1870-1910. Also in the works are some 4,000 panoramic photographs. AM
has recycled a fair amount of the work done by LC's Prints and
Photographs Division during the Library's optical disk pilot project in
the 1980s. For example, a special division of LC has tooled up and
thought through all the ramifications of electronic presentation of
photographs. Indeed, they are wheeling them out in great barrel loads.
The purpose of AM within the Library, it is hoped, is to catalyze several
of the other special collection divisions which have no particular
experience with, in some cases, mixed feelings about, an activity such as
AM. Moreover, in many cases the divisions may be characterized as not
only lacking experience in "electronifying" things but also in automated
cataloguing. MARC cataloguing as practiced in the United States is
heavily weighted toward the description of monograph and serial
materials, but is much thinner when one enters the world of manuscripts
and things that are held in the Library's music collection and other
units. In response to a comment by LESK, that AM's material is very
heavily photographic, and is so primarily because individual records have
been made for each photograph, FLEISCHHAUER observed that an item-level
catalog record exists, for example, for each photograph in the Detroit
Publishing collection of 25,000 pictures. In the case of the Federal
Writers Project, for which nearly 3,000 documents exist, representing
information from twenty-six different states, AM with the assistance of
Karen STUART of the Manuscript Division will attempt to find some way not
only to have a collection-level record but perhaps a MARC record for each
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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