The basic rule in converting PLD was to do no harm, to avoid the sins of intrusion in such a database: no introduction of newer editions, no on-the-spot changes, no eradicating of all possible falsehoods from an edition. Thus, PLD is not the final act in electronic publishing for this discipline, but simply the beginning. The conversion of PLD has evoked numerous unanticipated questions: How will information be used? What about networking? Can the rights of a database be protected? Should one protect the rights of a database? How can it be made available?
Those converting PLD also tried to avoid the sins of omission, that is, excluding portions of the collections or whole sections. What about the images? PLD is full of images, some are extremely pious nineteenth-century representations of the Fathers, while others contain highly interesting elements. The goal was to cover all the text of Migne (including notes, in Greek and in Hebrew, the latter of which, in particular, causes problems in creating a search structure), all the indices, and even the images, which are being scanned in separately searchable files.
Several North American institutions that have placed acquisition requests for the PLD database have requested it in magnetic form without software, which means they are already running it without software, without anything demonstrated at the Workshop.
What cannot practically be done is go back and reconvert and re-encode data, a time-consuming and extremely costly enterprise. CALALUCA sees PLD as a database that can, and should, be run under a variety of retrieval softwares. This will permit the widest possible searches. Consequently, the need to produce a CD-ROM of PLD, as well as to develop software that could handle some 1.3 gigabyte of heavily encoded text, developed out of conversations with collection development and reference librarians who wanted software both compassionate enough for the pedestrian but also capable of incorporating the most detailed lexicographical studies that a user desires to conduct. In the end, the encoding and conversion of the data will prove the most enduring testament to the value of the project.
The encoding of the database was also a hard-fought issue: Did the database need to be encoded? Were there normative structures for encoding humanist texts? Should it be SGML? What about the TEI—will it last, will it prove useful? CALALUCA expressed some minor doubts as to whether a data bank can be fully TEI-conformant. Every effort can be made, but in the end to be TEI-conformant means to accept the need to make some firm encoding decisions that can, indeed, be disputed. The TEI points the publisher in a proper direction but does not presume to make all the decisions for him or her. Essentially, the goal of encoding was to eliminate, as much as possible, the hindrances to information-networking, so that if an institution acquires a database, everybody associated with the institution can have access to it.
CALALUCA demonstrated a portion of Volume 160, because it had the most anomalies in it. The software was created by Electronic Book Technologies of Providence, RI, and is called Dynatext. The software works only with SGML-coded data.
Viewing a table of contents on the screen, the audience saw how Dynatext treats each element as a book and attempts to simplify movement through a volume. Familiarity with the Patrologia in print (i.e., the text, its source, and the editions) will make the machine-readable versions highly useful. (Software with a Windows application was sought for PLD, CALALUCA said, because this was the main trend for scholarly use.)
CALALUCA also demonstrated how a user can perform a variety of searches and quickly move to any part of a volume; the look-up screen provides some basic, simple word-searching.
CALALUCA argued that one of the major difficulties is not the software. Rather, in creating a product that will be used by scholars representing a broad spectrum of computer sophistication, user documentation proves to be the most important service one can provide.
CALALUCA next illustrated a truncated search under mysterium within ten words of virtus and how one would be able to find its contents throughout the entire database. He said that the exciting thing about PLD is that many of the applications in the retrieval software being written for it will exceed the capabilities of the software employed now for the CD-ROM version. The CD-ROM faces genuine limitations, in terms of speed and comprehensiveness, in the creation of a retrieval software to run it. CALALUCA said he hoped that individual scholars will download the data, if they wish, to their personal computers, and have ready access to important texts on a constant basis, which they will be able to use in their research and from which they might even be able to publish.