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DCL Participates In Digital Record
Of A Vanishing People
University of Cincinnati Digital Press has republished on CD-ROM a rare pictorial record of Native Americans during the early to middle 19th century. DCLnews reports.

SERVING as Commissioner of Indian Affairs between 1824 and 1830 must have been a poignant time for Thomas Loraine McKenney (1785-1859). He was a first hand witness to a slowly disappearing ethnic group. Fortunately for future generations, this prompted him to commission and collect portraits of Native Americans for his gallery in the War Department.

McKenney's dream was to publish a lasting record of this vanishing people -- complete with portraits, biographical sketches, and a history of the North American Indians. He accomplished this in the "History of the Indian Tribes of North America," published in three volumes between 1838 and 1844. James Hall (1793-1868) provided the text. The book -- now very rare -- is important as it is one of the earliest collections of Native American portraits.

McKenney would have been overjoyed -- and not a little amazed -- to discover that his record has been republished in digital format as an "e-reference" work by the University of Cincinnati Digital Press (UCDP).

"We've put the full three volumes on a three volume CD-ROM set," says Alice M. Cornell, assistant director and editor-in-chief at UCDP. "Besides the 120 images and text from the 1838-1844 edition, we've also included an image that was prepared, but not included in the original. Plus there are four additional images from the quarto edition of 1848-1850, making a total of 125 images."

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) were brought in to convert PDF image files of the three volumes into MS Word documents. "We did that ourselves with a previous book," says Cornell. "But we decided we weren't going to live long enough to do that again! There had to be a better way. DCL were recommended to us. And we were exceedingly pleased with the end result. They went out of their way to format the pages so they resembled the original, page for page, line for line."

Making rare books available to all
The mission of UCDP is to preserve rare books and make them available to all. With a price tag of $499, the McKenney and Hall digital book's main buyers are understandably research libraries, museums, dealers, collectors, and some individual researchers. But anyone interested in viewing the book can access it through the public libraries and museums that stock it.

Apart from preservation, there are other key benefits of bringing out an electronic edition of a rare book.

"The electronic approach allows readers to manipulate the content in ways that would not be possible with the printed version," explains Cornell. "For example, you can magnify images to look at them in more detail, and you can run fairly complex searches to find the specific information you want."

The backbone of the McKenny and Hall CD-ROM is an Access database that incorporates the ProSite bibliographic package. This launches Adobe Acrobat Reader, which allows users to read and navigate the book.

The future
In future, UCDP plan to make their publications web based. Currently, however, two things stand in the way -- bandwidth and security. Because UCDP publications feature detailed images, some of the files can run to 75 megabytes, which take an eternity to load for anyone using a standard dial-up connection. When it comes to the security of the images, UCDP aren't presently confident they can maintain it on the Web.

"It's essential that the ownership of the images isn't compromised," explains Cornell. "We rely on other institutions to help us put together collections like the McKenney and Hall History. If they are afraid they're going to see a 19th century native American holding a beer can in some ad, they're not going to be so keen to work with us! But we will go web based as soon as these issues are addressed."

Cornell makes clear that UCDP's electronic books are not intended to replace the print volumes they are reproducing. "People will still feel the need to view and handle the originals," she says. "After all, the book as an object is always something of interest. But electronic books, used in conjunction with rare books, or even with facsimiles or reprints, adds a great deal to the overall usability of works."

9/18/2002
DCLnews Editorial

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