ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


152

of tim e th a t librarians and staff members are d i­
rectly involved in training new student circulation 
employees and has insured th a t all the students are

presented w ith the same m aterial. The results have 
been notew orthy. ■ ■

Online databases and 
book preservation

By Danielle Mihrani
Assistant Curator, Bobst Library 
N ew  York University

Two topics of increasing interest to literary scholars were 
discussed at M LA.

T h i s  year’s annual m eeting of the M odern L a n ­

guage Association (MLA) took place in San F ra n ­
cisco on Decem ber 27-30, 1987. The attendance 
w as q u ite  la r g e — a p p r o x im a te ly  11,000 
particip an ts—and the sessions w hich w ere distrib­
u te d  over t h a t p e rio d  re a c h e d  a b e w ild e rin g  
n u m b er—721. Even for a single scholar, the a t­
tem pt to attend all concurrent sessions of interest 
w ithin a single subject specialty was nearly impos­
sible.

Though m uch of the program  had to do w ith lit­
erary studies, a few sessions proved quite interest­
ing from the lib rarian ’s perspective: those th a t re­
lated to online literary databases, and, for the very 
first tim e, to book preservation. There were also 
sessions dealing w ith desktop publishing, the ethics 
of publishing, and the evaluation of educational 
software. Anyone interested in obtaining a com ­
prehensive view of the program  should consult the 
November 1987 issue of the P M L A . This report will 
concentrate on a few sessions th a t brought together 
teams of librarians and academics in discussions re­
garding online databases and book preservation.

The m ain focus of one session (#230) was the

question: “Should there be a L ibrary of G reat B rit­
ain like the L ibrary of America?” w hile another 
(#137) concerned itself w ith “D ating Manuscripts: 
C urrent Science Techniques for the Identification 
of Paper and In k .” Another session of note (#130) 
was chaired by Geoffrey D. Smith (Ohio State Uni­
versity) and entitled “L iteratu re on File: Prospects 
for a N ational L iterary D a ta  Base.” Smith had a t­
tended an MLA m eeting in 1984 w here he h ad  p re­
sented the results of his work on the American Fic­
tio n  P ro je c t; th is tim e , th e  session in c lu d e d  
presentations dealing w ith  th e “A fro-A m erican 
Novel Project” (M aryem m a G raham , University of 
Mississippi) and the “Black Periodical Fiction Proj­
ect” (Ilenry Louis Gates Jr., Cornell University). 
L ib rarian s interested in o b tain in g  inform ation 
about these two databases are encouraged to con­
tact each of the tw o speakers.

The session began w ith MLA’s Eileen M. Mack- 
esy’s “Overview of C u rren t and F u tu re Develop­
m ent in Online L iterary D a ta  Bases.” Mackesy’s 
p resentation echoed m any lib ra ria n s’ concerns 
about the impossibility of obtaining an accurate 
tally of existing online databases in the hum anities.



153

Interestingly, one comment from the audience was 
that the MLA should consider publishing a direc­
tory of online databases relating to areas of interest 
to the mem bership. Mackesy noted th a t in the 
1960s such databases were not too well structured 
and th at there is now a need to create consortia for 
collections of databases in areas such as folklore, 
linguistics, women’s studies, and Germ an litera­
ture, to name just a few. She outlined a few of the 
partnerships with a few vendors th at the MLA was 
cu rren tly  considering, and acknow ledged th a t 
such ventures were not easy since certain questions, 
such as the merging of differently structured d ata­
bases and rights of ownership and distribution, are 
difficult to resolve. The MLA is currently working 
w ith organizations here and abroad, including 
Cam bridge University, in order to bring such plans 
to fruition.

ARTFL
Of parallel interest was session #380, chaired by 

myself, which dealt w ith the French textual d a ta ­
base, American and French Research on the T rea­
sury of the French Language (ARTFL). It is cur­
rently available at several libraries (including 
Berkeley, Columbia, and Yale) but because of its 
contents and, until recently, rather cumbersome 
search capability, the database has not received as 
much attention as it might. The panel consisted of 
one librarian (myself), two professors, (Paul A. 
Fortier, University of M anitoba, and Raymond T. 
Riva, University of Missouri, Kansas City) and a 
respondent, the director of the ARTFL, Robert 
Morrissey of the University of Chicago.

The database was conceived 25 years ago in 
France by Paul Imbs and evolved into the Institut 
National de la Langue Française in Nancy. The ini­
tial aim of the project was to compile a dictionary 
of the French language by using a “word bank” cre­
ated by m achine-readable texts. This project, fi­
nanced in 1957 by the French government, led to 
the creation of a new dictionary of the French lan­
guage, Le Trésor de la Langue Française. About 
1,500 works from the 18th to the 20th century were 
included.

This database was made available to researchers 
in North America through the University of Chi­
cago, which contracted w ith the Centre National 
de la Recherche Scientifique in 1981. Inaugurated 
in October 1983, ARTFL became accessible to the 
public in January 1984 and can be accessed via mo­
dem from anywhere in the United States and C an­
ada.

Some universities subscribe to ARTFL through 
their libraries, while others access it via individual 
departments. Critics of library subscriptions have 
asked: Can the library really minimize connect 
time? W hat are the equipment needs of a large user 
community? Can acquisition be justified by the 
num ber of potential users? W ould only librarians 
w ith expertise in French language and literature

qualify as search specialists?
Fortier m aintained th a t ARTFL software and its 

docum entation was superior to other products, but 
th at novices might find the m anual unclear. He 
also noted th a t the compilation of concordances 
should not be a problem since ARTFL uses the Ox­
ford Concordance Package (OCP), in his opinion 
one of the best software packages available for this 
application.

Riva reported on some of the frustrations he en­
countered in his own online searching. He found 
his 300-baud modem far too slow; his unfamiliarity 
with ARRAS led to problems in his search strate­
gies; and his frustration was heightened by the fact 
th a t th e re  w ere long w a its for ta p es to be 
m ounted—in some cases tapes were changed only 
at night, and sometimes they were unavailable on 
weekends (I was told by some researchers th at a 24- 
hour notice was required for access to some texts). 
Fortier said th at he has been able to experiment 
w ith different baud rates when data interrupts be­
came a problem. He also urged users to create a 
notebook entitled “This Works” in which success­
ful logon and save procedures can be kept at hand.

In view of the various problems it is not surpris­
ing th at several of the librarians whom I inter­
viewed both before and after the conference ex­
pressed dissatisfaction w ith the d atab ase as a 
library resource. A paper, presenting one librari­
an’s experience with the database (J. Spohrer, Uni­
versity of California, Berkeley) is scheduled for the 
WESS conference in Florence this April.

Robert Morrissey announced th a t annual sub­
scription rates to ARTFL were reduced to $500, ef­
fective in January 1988, and th at in March a new 
system , P hiloL ogic, w ill rep lace ARRAS and 
greatly expand its research capability. Because 
PhiloLogic will run on dedicated computers owned 
by the ARTFL Project rather than the University of 
Chicago’s m ainfram e, the annual fee will provide 
for a large block of free computer time so th a t most 
subscribers will pay only for connect charges. Fi­
nally, PhiloLogic will perm it immediate access to 
any work in the database, both by dum b terminals 
or by a new Macintosh term inal interface.

The database continues to grow as individual 
scholars donate their own machine-readable texts 
and it can serve as a central national repository of 
French literature, history, and political science, 
accessible to scholars and researchers on demand.

MRTH
The next logical step is bibliographic control. Is 

th e re  a N a tio n a l U nion C a ta lo g  of F re n c h  
machine-readable texts? The answer is no, not a 
complete one. Machine-Readable Texts in the H u­
manities (MRTH), compiled by Rutgers University 
and available for searching on RLIN in its MDF 
file, originated about 1984 under the direction of 
M arianne I. G aunt, librarian at Rutgers’s Alexan­
der Library. At its inception the file included infor­



154

m ation on 50 items; today it includes inform ation 
on 661 items. For a com plete listing of the MRTH, 
select com mand: fin cp rut#; the file m ay also be 
searched using all other regular RLIN commands.

MRTH includes inform ation on some ARTFL 
texts as well as m achine-readable texts in h u m an i­
ties from elsewhere in the w orld—D utch literary 
texts, Shona proverbs, ancient Greek and Roman 
texts, Italian linguistic works, and literary texts 
and ballads from Oxford. Approximately 88% of 
the inform ation in M RTH consists of works in 
ARTFL, although it is incomplete. I tried a p er­
sonal nam e search for Victor Hugo and obtained 
nothing, although one user did get a concordance 
of specific terms in H ugo’s works by using ARTFL. 
The file also contains typographical errors, so th a t 
it is possible to miss a title if the search is done by 
key words in the title field or if an au th o r’s nam e is 
misspelled during cataloging.

Preservation

An im portant session dealing w ith the topic of 
book preservation was entitled, “Brittle Books: The 
Preservation Crisis in the N ation’s Libraries and 
W h a t’s Being done About I t . ” It was arranged by 
the MLA D epartm ent of English Program s and 
was chaired by George F arr J r., of the National 
E ndow m ent for the H um anities. The panel con­
sisted of three speakers: John W . tlaeg er, Research 
Libraries G roup; Barclay W . Ogden, University of 
California, Berkeley; and Phyllis Franklin, execu­
tive director of the MLA.

The m eeting’s goal was to explore ways in which 
scholars m ight contribute to the preservation of 
books, and it followed the screening of the 28- 
m inute version of Slow Fires: On the Preservation 
o f the H um an Record, shown tw o days earlier. In 
an editorial in the W inter 1987 issue of the M L A  
Newsletter, p p .4 -5 , Franklin discussed the p ro b ­
lem of brittle books and the topics raised in the 
film, and she urged conference-goers to view the 
film.

John Ilaeger noted th a t “the only viable solution 
to the preservation of books is m icrofilm ing.” To 
conservators this is a sweeping statem ent and, re­
grettably, throughout the session no other methods 
of preservation w ere discussed. However, Haeger 
pointed out th a t m icrofilm ing is an expensive and 
very labor-intensive operation th a t remains at a 
cottage-industry level. As a result, RLG is m aking 
available in m achine-readable form  the biblio­
graphic record of existing m aterial microfilmed by 
any RLG m em ber institution. The first target of 
this cooperative m icrofilm ing project are Ameri­
can im prints th a t are in the greatest state of peril. 
The second targeted set is m aterial from the late 
19th and early 20th centuries; individual m em ber 
institutions can choose a field th a t they wish to ta r ­
get for m icrofilm ing (history, lite ra tu re , etc.). 
Acoording to Haeger, this is a vacuum -cleaner ap ­
proach, because no effort has been m ade to decide

which items are more im portant th a n  others; once 
the field has been chosen, all brittle books w ithin it 
become candidates for filming.

This procedure was chosen as a result of the find­
ings of a project conducted by the American Philo­
logical Association, w hich appointed an editorial 
board of scholars who worked from shelf lists and 
bibliographies to create a list of key titles printed 
betw een 1850 and 1918. T he books w hich a p ­
peared on the list were filmed by Colum bia Uni­
versity.

The project showed th a t such editorial boards 
are not really effective: scholars differed in their 
choice of titles needing preservation and did not 
agree on a final list. F urtherm ore, this m ethod is 
time-consuming, costly, and cannot be replicated 
on a large scale; too m any titles need preserving 
and tim e is running out. In response to a suggestion 
by Phyllis Franklin th a t perhaps the collections of 
m ajor libraries are themselves a proxy collection of 
titles to be saved, Haeger pointed out th a t im por­
ta n t m aterial remains underrepresented in the best 
of collections. As an example he indicated th a t in 
his own field of specialization, medieval Chinese 
history, the collections in most libraries are under­
represented; local and regional history, trad e jour­
nals, and ephem era are also sparsely collected by 
most m ajor libraries.

Phyllis Franklin’s presentation centered on the 
question of financing m ajor preservation projects. 
She outlined two sets of options.

First, if the Council on L ibrary Resources’ C om ­
mission on Preservation and Access can generate 
funds to microfilm the best collections of books 
held by m ajo r research lib raries in th e  U nited 
States, then the target period w ould be 1860-1920. 
F uture scholars w ould need to ensure th a t no gaps 
exist in those collections. However, this option re­
mains very costly: $384 million is her estim ate for 
filming one-third of the volumes considered im por­
ta n t, and this figure represents only 20 % of the to ­
tal num ber of brittle books.

A second option requires selective measures. 
Franklin suggested th a t instead of a title-by-title se­
lection, a range of m aterial could be chosen as rep­
resentative of titles found w ithin a field. It then be­
comes relatively easy to identify m ajor subject 
areas, as well as m inor authors, and preserve exam­
ples typifying each subject or author. Another proj­
ect would be to compile descriptive bibliographies 
covering both extant and lost m aterial, thus p ro ­
viding future researchers w ith m ore detailed infor­
m ation th a n  an u n a n n o ta te d  bibliography or a 
publisher’s trade list.

Franklin identified three geographical areas th a t 
she felt should be targeted first by MLA: G erm any, 
Italy, and the United States, particularly because 
the period to be covered (1860-1920) is so im por­
ta n t historically for those countries. She added th a t 
if these projects prove w orthw hile, MLA would 
tu rn  to the literature of other countries. Her plan is 
to approach the divisions and discussion groups in



155

those specific areas and urge them to include pres­
ervation concerns in the planning of sessions for 
their next annual meeting in December 1988.

Barclay Ogden, head of the preservation pro­
gram at Berkeley, noted th a t the library is the 
scholar’s laboratory and that it behooves scholars to 
be involved in preservation programs. He indi­
cated that one of the major priorities of a preserva­
tion program  should be collection security. He 
claimed that, though many libraries believe in de­
mocratizing access to their collections (to the point 
of com prom ising security), his ow n inquiries 
among scholars have shown that they do endorse 
restrictive access, if the reasons given are well- 
documented and reasonable. He also encouraged 
scholars to ensure that their library has a well- 
established disaster plan, as protection against the 
consequences of natural disasters.

The normal wear and tear on a collection, even 
for non-brittle books, necessitates a hard look at the 
question of book replacem ent. In some cases, 
Ogden cautioned, some books which are not in 
heavy demand are never reprinted, and yet they 
merit preservation. He asked scholars to get in­
volved in the preservation process by suggesting ti­
tles in the collection which should be preserved. He 
added that new trends in scholarship create shifts 
in interest, and that scholars can spot these trends 
and alert their library.

George Farr concluded the session by outlining 
the current goals of the National Endowment for 
the Humanities. Though preservation plans have 
been in place since 1979, two are currently being 
considered:

1) grants for research in the humanities (micro­
filming projects and evaluative programs which 
would bring together scholars and librarians in an 
effort to identify fields and specialties needing pres­
ervation); and

2) projects that would help promote preserva­
tion activities, training for preservation managers 
(such as the Columbia program), grants for the 
preservation of regional collections, grants for re­
search in the technology of preservation, and

grants aimed at raising the public awareness of the 
need for preservation.

The ensuing discussion elicited a few additional 
details: a) we need to know how other countries are 
dealing with preservation problems and establish 
cooperative programs, especially since so much of 
the scholarly interests of the MLA include world 
literature; b) scholars must actively lobby for acid- 
free paper as a standard in humanities publishing; 
and c) public awareness could be raised if govern­
ment agencies would issue frequent text and video 
news releases about collections in the nation’s li­
braries, featuring them as part of the national heri­
tage to be preserved for future generations, and 
providing suggestions about possible contributions 
of talent and funding from the private sector.

Regrettably, attendance at this session was not 
very high: there were no more than about 10 or 11 
(including the speakers). The time of the session 
was most unfortunate—it was held on the very last 
day, during the very last set of early afternoon ses­
sions, and it was the 714th of 721 sessions at the 
conference. Clearly the session was held to estab­
lish a possible agenda for future action, but the im­
portance of the subject calls for more than one ses­
sion, more panelists (including conservators), and 
a wider spectrum of points to consider. At the con­
clusion of the session there was no consensus on 
points to be considered for future MLA meetings, 
other than general discussion.

Librarians interested in furthering the exchange 
of ideas on databases in the humanities, preserva­
tion, or any other that might prove of m utual inter­
est to academics and librarians, may submit pro­
posals for special sessions at the next meeting (the 
deadline for the proposal of sessions is in April 
1988). Details regarding the preparation of such 
proposals appear yearly in the preceding Novem­
ber issue of the PMLA. Hopefully by next year’s 
conference, teams of scholars, librarians, and pres­
ervation experts can be formed to contribute in 
even greater num bers to the annual d elib era­
tions. ■ ■

PUBLIC AUCTION 17TH-20TH CENTURY PERIODICALS/SERIALS 
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

March 24,1:30 PM. Conducted by Waverly Auctions for/at 
THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, 20th & The Parkway, Philadelphia

SAMPLE TITLES: Acta Erudito, Motor Age, Building News, English 
Mechanic, Philo Trans Royal Society of London, Observations Sur La Physique

Catalog $6 from WAVERLY AUCTIONS, INC. 4931 Cordell Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 
(301-951-8883) Preview appointment (215-448-1227)