ACRL New England Chapter News Online

ISSN 1527-0106

Winter 2007, Number 110

In This Issue (Home):

President's Letter

2007 Annual Conference Date Set

Board Elections begin this month!

ACRL Legislative Advocates Needed

Interest Group Reports:

Chapter Member News:

Board Minutes, January 9, 2007
Calendar Listings

WSIG Report

Evelyn M. Cherpak, Naval War College
Co-Chair, Women's Studies Interest Group

The Women's Studies Interest Group met at the John Hay Library on December 1 for a presentation by the Women Writers Project (WWP). Twenty-five women attended the program, including several librarians and professors from Brown University.

Julia Flanders, director of the Project, spoke during the morning session on the history, mission, and current work of the Project. The Women Writers Project was conceived in the late 1980s with the purpose of building an electronic text base for pre-Victorian women’s writings in an effort to enhance teaching and scholarship. Supported by a grant from the NEH, the project got underway as both the need for a collection of this type and the technology became available.

The Project developed sequentially. During its early stages, information was gathered; bibliographies and writers identified, and decisions were made regarding full text presentation. The second phase was encoding; the third involved encoding research and the development of guidelines and data standards. Publication of the text followed with an attempt to maximize access and minimize cost. Subscribers cost was between $100 and $1500 and individuals paid $100. Free trials were available on request. The website was redesigned in the final phase.

After a Center for Digital Initiatives sponsored lunch at the Brown Faculty Club, the afternoon sessions were devoted to the technological aspects of the project. Paul Caton of the WWP spoke about publishing the text; the compromise between encoding and available technologies; reproducing textual features; and searching with Philologic. Patrick Yott of the Center for Digital Initiatives addressed concerns for support of faculty projects, ways to access text and efforts to develop a digital repository for the university. Syd Bauman of the WWP spoke about encoding systems, definitions, standards, descriptive markup, marking language and TEI.