info-sources-msg - 11/17/95
Non-book info. sources, libraries.
NOTE: See also the files: CD-ROMs-msg, maps-msg, SCA-library-lst,
publications-msg, museums-msg, videos-msg.
************************************************************************
NOTICE -
This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that
I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some
messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday.
This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium.
These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org
I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with
seperate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes
extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were
removed to save space and remove clutter.
The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I
make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the
individual authors.
Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these
messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this
time. If information is published from these messages, please give
credit to the orignator(s).
Thank you,
Mark S. Harris AKA: HL Stefan li Rous
mark.s.harris at motorola.com stefan at florilegium.org
************************************************************************
From: tmyers at unl.edu (tim myers)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: More LISTSERVs
Date: 21 Mar 1993 00:13:40 GMT
Organization: University of Nebraska--Lincoln
sclark at epas.utoronto.CA (Susan Clark) writes:
>Greetings all--
> For your dining pleasure, swiped from the pages of the Medieval
> Academy News, yet more LISTSERVs to while away your evenings:
> CHAUCER at UNLINF.UNL.EDU Chaucer r and Middle English
CHAUCER at UNLINFO.UNL.EDU correct address
also CALONTIR at UNLINFO.UNL.EDU non-scholarly, but SCA, low volume
--
Tim Myers Toli the Curious
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Shire of Mag Mor
Lincoln, Nebraska Kingdom of Calontir
tmyers at unlinfo.unl.edu
From: ae766 at yfn.ysu.edu (David Sanders)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: New research source
Date: 21 Mar 93 16:22:33 GMT
Organization: Youngstown State/Youngstown Free-Net
Greetings to all, from Vajk!
The following came across ANSAX-L Saturday night.
The poster has asked that his name be removed, since he had
gotten from elsewhere (it did not originate with him).
=================================================================
From the good folks who brought to you MALIN, this new wonder:
ANNOUNCEMENT OF HNSOURCE
The Department of History and Academic Computer Services of the
University of Kansas HNSOURCE under the auspices of The History
Network to serve as a centralinformation server for historians.
The server presently provides connections toon-line library
catalogues through a HYTELNET facility, to some data bases and
FTP sites that contain materials relevant to historical studies,
as well as a full text document archive, access to world-wide
gophers, several works on the use of the Internet, some Gutenberg
electronic texts, and other facilities.
The History Network intends that HNSOURCE eventually provide
connections to allpublic access facilities of use to historians,
and to serve as a point of collection for materials that
historians wish to share with the public. A bulletin board
feature is ready to accommodate calls for papers, conference
notices, job announcements and the like. HNSOURCE is a hypertext
facility with switching facilities provided by LYNX. It is
intended to offer a maximum of ease and simplicity of use, and
comments, criticisms, and suggestions may be made to the
operators from within the system
To reach HNSOURCE:
TELNET hnsource.cc.ukans.edu login: history no password
required.
Please feel free to browse and copy whatever you wish. We would
particularly appreciate your comments and suggestions, as well as
pointers to useful sources and sites, and the donation of
whatever materials you think might be of use to others. Also,
please think of HNSOURCE when you wish to make announcements of
any sort, or if you wish to develop a professional electronic
service of any kind. The more widely this facility is used, the
more useful it will become.
Operators:
Marc Becker (MABECKER at UKANVM) Department of History University of
Kansas
Lynn H. Nelson (LHNELSON at UKANVM) Department of History University
of Kansas
Snailmail:
The History Network Department of History 3001 Wescoe Hall
University of Kansas Lawrence KS 66045-2130:
Lynn_Nelson
Department of History
University of Kansas
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
From: jcumming at epas.utoronto.ca (James Cummings)
Subject: HNSource now open for business
Organization: University of Toronto - EPAS
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1993 21:57:46 GMT
Thought Some SCA-types not on Mediev-l or Ansax-l or some of the other lists
might be interested in this new service (though it's not perfect at the
moment.)
-------cut-----here---------------(go ahead try it!)------
ANNOUNCEMENT OF HNSOURCE
The Department of History and Academic Computer Services of the University of
Kansas HNSOURCE under the auspices of The History Network to serve as a
centralinformation server for historians. The server presently provides
connections toon-line library catalogues through a HYTELNET facility, to some
data bases and FTP sites that contain materials relevant to historical
studies, as well as a full text document archive, access to world-wide
gophers, several works on the use of the Internet, some Gutenberg electronic
texts, and other facilities.
The History Network intends that HNSOURCE eventually provide connections to
allpublic access facilities of use to historians, and to serve as a point of
collection for materials that historians wish to share with the public. A
bulletin board feature is ready to accommodate calls for papers, conference
notices, job announcements and the like. HNSOURCE is a hypertext facility with
switching facilities provided by LYNX. It is intended to offer a maximum of
ease and simplicity of use, and comments, criticisms, and suggestions may be
made to the operators from within the system
To reach HNSOURCE:
TELNET hnsource.cc.ukans.edu login: history no password required.
Please feel free to browse and copy whatever you wish. We would particularly
appreciate your comments and suggestions, as well as pointers to useful
sources and sites, and the donation of whatever materials you think might be of
use to others. Also, please think of HNSOURCE when you wish to make
announcements of any sort, or if you wish to develop a professional
electronic service of any kind. The more widely this facility is used, the
more useful it will become.
Operators:
Marc Becker (MABECKER at UKANVM) Department of History University of Kansas Lynn
H. Nelson (LHNELSON at UKANVM) Department of History University of Kansas
Snailmail:
The History Network Department of History 3001 Wescoe Hall University of
Kansas Lawrence KS 66045-2130:
Lynn_Nelson
Department of History
University of Kansas
From: VINCENTI at zodiac.rutgers.EDU
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Early English and Norse texts society
Date: 14 Apr 1993 11:11:59 -0400
Organization: The Internet
SOCIETY FOR EARLY ENGLISH AND NORSE ELECTRONIC TEXTS
We announce with this notice, which we are sending to
several related lists, the formation of a new scholarly organiza-
tion, The Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts
(SEENET). SEENET will procure, produce, and disseminate scholar-
ly electronic editions of Old Norse, Old English and Middle
English texts. We will combine the full capacities of computer
technology with the highest standards of traditional scholarly
editing to publish machine-readable texts with reliable introduc-
tory materials, annotations, and apparatus. Texts will conform
to the Text Encoding Initiative's (TEI) guidelines for markup in
the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) format.
An electronic text offers unprecedented advantages to
historians, literary critics, linguists, and editors. Unlike
earlier, printed critical texts, the electronic text permits
manipulations of individual manuscripts, archetypes, and critical
texts as well as combinations of each. Such texts lend them-
selves to sophisticated searches, concordancing, collations, and
other forms of text retrieval. Editors may present in full both
"good" and "bad" manuscripts, permitting literary historians to
study the history of the reception of the text as shown by
scribal changes or marginal annotations. Historical linguists
may study developments in the history of the language through
access to large databases of scribal spellings in all the dia-
lects and time periods reflected in many different textual
traditions. Scholars interested in stylistic analysis are able
to make fuller and more complete studies of metrical, lexical, or
syntactic patterning than are possible with printed texts.
Moreover, the extremely flexible nature of an electronic text is
ideal for representing complex textual traditions, even of works
like Piers Plowman, where editors confront high degrees of ambi-
guity and uncertainty. Electronic editions will accommodate
scholars who prefer "best text" documentary editions as well as
those who want the best possible modern editorial reconstruc-
tions.
Questions of the accessibility and quality of electronic
texts are, therefore, a matter of current concern to a scholarly
community increasingly enabled by electronic media. We are all
aware that the limitations imposed by the printed codex need no
longer constrain our historical, cultural, linguistic, or textual
scholarship. Nevertheless, the institutional means for producing
and disseminating reliable electronic texts are at present
haphazard and inadequate. Scholars familiar with the Oxford Text
Archive or with the Anglo-Saxon corpus know only too well how
various is the quality of texts in those useful collections.
Meanwhile, novice editors enthusiastic about computing are
adapting older printed editions for more or less elaborate forms
of textual manipulation. Unhappily, such editions are more often
selected for the single reason that they are out of copyright
than for the quality of their texts. Furthermore, large and
extremely costly commercial projects such as the Chadwyck-Healey
version of the Patrologia Latina or their similar corpus of
English poetry have become means of disseminating older, obsolete
editions. Such collections are too immediately useful to be dis-
missed in spite of the uneven quality of the texts thus made
available, but scholars are coming to associate electronic texts
with poor editions. If the full potential of computer technology
is to be realized by scholars in the humanities, our first and
most important task will be to make available reliable scholarly
editions, texts that are as sophisticated in their linguistic,
paleographic, codicological, historical dimensions as they are in
their computer technology.
PUBLICATIONS
Our Editorial Board will solicit, evaluate, select, and
oversee scholarly editions for publication in three series.
SERIES A will consist primarily of book-length editions
published on floppy disks (usually under five mega-
bytes). For this series we will publish both diplomat-
ic transcriptions of manuscript texts and critical
texts, or combinations of the two. Texts will be
accompanied by an introduction as well as appropriate
historical, paleographic, codicological, lexical, and
interpretative annotations.
SERIES B will consist of culturally important works
with complex textual or critical traditions. Texts in
this series will accommodate some or all of the follow-
ing features:
(a) digitized facsimiles of some or all manuscripts,
(b) diplomatic transcriptions of each manuscript with
appropriate annotation,
(c) a reconstructed archetype with annotation,
(d) an edited text with annotations (perhaps incor-
porating critical comments of previous editors),
(e) a display of collated variants,
(f) lemmatized concordances of each manuscript, the
archetype, and the critical text,
(g) critical introduction, and
(h) a glossary.
Texts in Series B will be published on CD-ROM disks or tape.
SERIES C will serve an interim function by publishing
electronic versions of useful older editions with SGML
markup, until such time as the works may be re-edited.
One example might be an electronic version of Finnur
Jo'nsson's Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning pub-
lished in 1912-15 with both diplomatic transcriptions
from single manuscripts (Series A) and heavily edited
texts of the skaldic corpus (Series B). An electronic
text of this outdated printed text would serve until
SEENET is able to publish new electronic versions of
the skaldic corpus.
STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIETY
(a) The Editorial Board
Peter Baker, The University of Virginia.
Hoyt N. Duggan, The University of Virginia.
A. S. G. Edwards, University of Victoria, British
Columbia
Anthony Faulkes, The University of Birmingham
Ralph Hanna III, University of California--River-
side
Judith Jesch, Institute for Medieval Studies,
University of Nottingham
John Price-Wilkin, Information Management Coordi-
nator, Alderman Library, The University of
Virginia
Peter Robinson, Computing Service, Oxford University
Thorlac Turville-Petre, Institute for Medieval
Studies, University of Nottingham
(b) The ADVISORY BOARD consists of an international group of
distinguished medievalists who will advise SEENET's Board of Edi-
tors on matters of policy. The present Advisory Board consists
of the following scholars:
Professors John Alford, Michigan State University; Ste-
phen Barney, University of California, Irvine; Larry D.
Benson, Harvard University; John Burrow, Bristol;
Patrick Conner, West Virginia University; Marilyn
Deegan, Oxford University; Christine Fell, Institute
for Medieval Studies, University of Nottingham; Allen
Frantzen, Loyola University, Chicago; David Greetham,
Graduate School and University Center, CUNY; Thomas J.
Heffernan, University of Tennessee; Robert L. Kellogg,
University of Virginia; Kevin Kiernan, University of
Kentucky; V.A. Kolve, University of California, Los
Angeles; Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto; Michael
Lapidge, Cambridge University; Anne Middleton, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley; Alistair Minnis, Univer-
sity of York; Douglas Moffat, University of Michigan;
Derek Pearsall, Harvard University; Fred Robinson, Yale
University; Geoffrey Russom, Brown University; R. A.
Shoaf, University of Florida, A. C. Spearing, Univer-
sity of Virginia; and Paul Szarmach, SUNY Binghamton.
(c) The Members of the Society
Members will pay an annual fee which will entitle them
to receive the SEENET Newsletter and one text from
Series A or C. Just as with the Early English Text
Society, members will be able to purchase SEENET's
other electronic texts at a discounted price, and the
texts will be available to non-members at a higher
price.
We are presently seeking the sponsorship of a major
academic press to publish our three series, and it
would be helpful in that effort if we can offer pub-
lishers an idea of the potential membership for the new
society. We would like to know what kinds of member-
ship fees would be acceptable and whether scholars
would be willing to submit their scholarly electronic
texts to SEENET for publication.
Response Form
1. Will you be likely to join SEENET?
2. How much would you be willing to pay per year to be a member
of SEENET and receive one text from Series A or C? We are
negotiating with publishers, and prices will depend upon costs,
but we expect that annual dues would be under $30.00 US or #15
sterling.
3. Are you interested in texts in Old English? Old Norse?
Middle English?
4. Characterize briefly the purposes for which you need machine-
readable texts (e.g., lexical, syntactical, metrical, stylistic,
language history, dialectology, other?).
5. Do you have software available to you that will interpret
SGML marked up text?
6. On what platform(s) will you use electronic texts?
UNIX
DOS
MAC
OS/2
WINDOWS
OTHER
7. Should SEENET provide software for concordancing, collating,
searching its texts?
8. Have you produced or have in preparation an electronic text?
Would you consider submitting it for publication?
9. What texts would you most like to see available in electronic
form?
We invite comments, criticism, and support from medievalists in
all disciplines. Responses by e-mail may be directed to
hnd at virginia.edu (or) hnd at virginia.bitnet
or by regular post to either
Thorlac Turville-Petre
Department of English
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD
England
or
Hoyt N. Duggan
Department of English
The University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903.
From: gbrent at rschp1.anu.EDU.AU (Geoffrey Brent)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Vatican library
Date: 10 May 1994 20:42:28 -0400
Organization: the internet
Good gentles, the following is for your interest, from _New Scientist_
7/5/94.
****
Priceless historic manuscripts from the Vatican's library - Ptolemy's
Geography, early printed works, Virgil's poems - could soon be called up
onto computer screens via the Internet computer network. The library has
just begun an 18-month pilot project to study ways to make part of its
collection of 150 000 manuscripts and two million books more accessible
to scholars, while protecting them from possible damage. IBM will help
on the project.
More than 10 000 pages from illuminated manuscripts and books will be
scanned into a database. The images will then be processed to remove
stains, magnify details, increase contrast and restore faded colours.
The library is also computerising its two million index cards, and will
link them to the image database. The Pontifical Catholic University in
Rio De Janiero will keep duplicate databases to serve computer networks
in North and South America. Even when compressed, the data will occupy
about 50 gigabytes.
Among the library's 500-year-old collection are 8000 books published in
the first 50 years of the printing press and the four oldest manuscripts
of Virgil's poems. Because the library has limited space and staff, only
2000 people are allowed to use it each year. "This will mean people can
study the works from their own university," says an IBM spokesman.
****
I hope this is of some interest to those who sek historical books; I
have no further information on the subject.
Regards, Geoffrey the Quiet
<the end>