The Electronic Text Center in Sterling Memorial Library houses the library's growing collection of more than five thousand electronic texts in the humanities and serves the research needs of numerous disciplines. The textbases located in the Electronic Text Center enable users to easily do original research in ways previously difficult, if not impossible. A few projects carried out in the ETC, for example, have included a search to locate imagery relating to Christmas in the works of Shakespeare, searches for textual references to figures appearing in classical Greek iconography, searches for astronomical imagery in Patristic theology, and attempts to identify unknown Greek manuscripts. All of these projects would have been difficult or time-consuming to do manually; they were, however, easily accomplished electronically. The ETC, located in room 509 of Sterling Memorial Library, is open Monday through Friday from 1pm through 5pm. Staffed by the director and two humanities graduate students, the ETC provides a wide range of resources in support of scholarship in many fields.
Those interested in classical Greece will find the hypertext product Perseus invaluable. Perseus includes primary texts--in both Greek and English--such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a library of over 4,000 vase, sculpture, and coin images from collections around the world. Perseus also includes maps, archaeological site plans and photographs, and an encyclopedia. Students and scholars of Classical, Medieval and Religious Studies will find the Patrologia Latina Database, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts, and the Hebrew Responsa Database particularly useful for searching and analyzing ancient works in their original languages. Philosophers will make use of Past Masters. Scholars of American literature can access via computer the works of Melville, Faulkner, Cather, and others to do textual analysis with an efficiency unattainable in other media while students of modern American history have access to a number of full-text products including the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1728 through 1765 that includes both searchable text and images of the actual newspaper. Historians of twentieth-century America will want to use the hypertext version of the Haldeman Diaries which, in addition to the diary itself, includes the presidential appointment book, photographs and home movies from the Nixon White House, etc.
In addition to locally-owned textbases, the ETC provides access to online textbases including the Dartmouth Dante Project, and the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) textual database. The Dartmouth Dante Project, containing the full text of the Divine Comedy and the criticism of more than 40 major Dante critics, provides access to important texts, many of which are rare and difficult to obtain. ARTFL, a cooperative project between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the University of Chicago, contains over 2,000 works in French from the 15th through the 20th centuries in fields as varied as literature, philosophy, and the sciences.
Software for textual analysis is also available in the ETC. Two simple yet quite powerful programs are WordCruncher and Micro-OCP. These programs can generate such things as indexes, word lists, word-frequency statistics, and concordances. They may be used with many of the commercial products mentioned above or with other electronic texts. While ETC staff members are available to assist users with these tools and texts, they can also help to identify, locate, and obtain other electronic texts utilizing resources such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), the Oxford Text Archive, Archie, Veronica, and the World Wide Web. When our newly ordered scanner arrives, the ETC staff will be available to assist users in the creation of electronic texts.
Paul J. Constantine is Director of the Electronic Text Center at the Yale University Library. For further information please call the ETC at 432-8373 or send e-mail to Paul.Constantine@Yale.Edu.