Building the Digital Library: The University of Michigan's UMLibText Project.

Over the past decade, new data formats and new tools have emerged that hold the promise of greatly enhancing the resources available to scholars. The UMLibText initiative is one of several evolving projects designed to provide expanded and/or enhanced access to electronic information resources for the University of Michigan community. Following a review of the history of this textual-analysis project, its current status and continuing development are discussed in the context of the rapidly emerging electronic information environment on campus. The much-publicized information explosion and technology revolution hold the potential for greatly enhancing the resources available to scholars. New data formats and new tools are continually emerging, but the scholar's knowledge of and ability to utilize these tools effectively may lag behind the rapid rate of development. Universities, and in particular libraries, must continue to develop the capacity and expertise to promote and provide access to these new systems and resources. An example of one such effort is the UMLibText project under way at the University of Michigan. Project History During the mid-1980s, the University of Michigan Graduate Library become involved in several initiatives to support primary information in electronic formats. One of the first initiatives involved providing access to electronic text services such as ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) at the University of Chicago. Use of the ARTEL service soon raised sufficient awareness and interest in electronic text services that a local implementation of a similar service was desired. By 1988, several more initiatives had developed to the extent that the library recognized the need for a data services librarian. The position filled that year involved traditional reference service, advisory and technical support functions for bibliographic databases, and collection development responsibilities, plus responsibilities for further development of initiatives involving primary data in electronic formats. During 1986-89, as the library gained more experience with textual analysis, it became apparent that no one software package could accomplish everything for all users--each package facilities specific types of analyses. In addition, staff gained a clearer understanding of the nature of the work beieng done by researchers, i.e., it is not significantly different from work done with print resources, it is intensely private work, and it cannot be mediated by a librarian. It was also qucikly apparent that the environment for text and software was far from ideal--standards were only beginning to evolve for the description of text, and the software for use with the standardized texts was a rare commodity. Out of these early experiences, the library eventually developed three goals for its electronic text initiatives: * To provide a software and hardware platform adequate for serving a broad range of textual-analysis needs * To facilitate remote multiuser access * To begin a local collection of text in a standardized format suitable for a variety of textual-analysis applications such as authoring studies, thermatic analysis, and linguistic analysis. To further inform development of the local project, the data services librarian surveyed Research Libraries Group (RLG) academic libraries during mid-1989 to determine what role libraries were playing in supporting textual analysis on campuses.[1] Survey results indicated that a majority of libraries were actively involved in providing support for machine-readable text files, but most were not yet collecting such files or providing the necessary tools to use these locally. Thus, the primary involvement appeared to be in helping users locate or use files--little library acquisition of files was taking place. Building on the information gained from the survey, the University of Michigan Library launched its electronic text efort in 1989 as a pilot project, thus linking the activities of collection development and departmental liaison with data-support functions. …