5. Re fair and liberal networking policies, what are the risks to an electronic publisher?
6. How does the emergence of national and international education networks affect the use and viability of research projects requiring high investment? Do the new European Community directives concerning database protection necessitate two distinct publishing projects, one for North America and one for overseas?
From new notions of "scholarly fair use" to the future of optical media, virtually every issue related to electronic publishing was aired. The result is two projects which have been constructed to provide the quality research resources with the fewest encumbrances to use by teachers and private scholars.
Dorothy TWOHIG
In spring 1988 the editors of the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin were approached by classics scholar David Packard on behalf of the Packard Humanities Foundation with a proposal to produce a CD-ROM edition of the complete papers of each of the Founding Fathers. This electronic edition will supplement the published volumes, making the documents widely available to students and researchers at reasonable cost. We estimate that our CD-ROM edition of Washington's Papers will be substantially completed within the next two years and ready for publication. Within the next ten years or so, similar CD-ROM editions of the Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison papers also will be available. At the Library of Congress's session on technology, I would like to discuss not only the experience of the Washington Papers in producing the CD-ROM edition, but the impact technology has had on these major editorial projects. Already, we are editing our volumes with an eye to the material that will be readily available in the CD-ROM edition. The completed electronic edition will provide immense possibilities for the searching of documents for information in a way never possible before. The kind of technical innovations that are currently available and on the drawing board will soon revolutionize historical research and the production of historical documents. Unfortunately, much of this new technology is not being used in the planning stages of historical projects, simply because many historians are aware only in the vaguest way of its existence. At least two major new historical editing projects are considering microfilm editions, simply because they are not aware of the possibilities of electronic alternatives and the advantages of the new technology in terms of flexibility and research potential compared to microfilm. In fact, too many of us in history and literature are still at the stage of struggling with our PCs. There are many historical editorial projects in progress presently, and an equal number of literary projects. While the two fields have somewhat different approaches to textual editing, there are ways in which electronic technology can be of service to both.
Since few of the editors involved in the Founding Fathers CD-ROM editions are technical experts in any sense, I hope to point out in my discussion of our experience how many of these electronic innovations can be used successfully by scholars who are novices in the world of new technology. One of the major concerns of the sponsors of the multitude of new scholarly editions is the limited audience reached by the published volumes. Most of these editions are being published in small quantities and the publishers' price for them puts them out of the reach not only of individual scholars but of most public libraries and all but the largest educational institutions. However, little attention is being given to ways in which technology can bypass conventional publication to make historical and literary documents more widely available.
What attracted us most to the CD-ROM edition of The Papers of George Washington was the fact that David Packard's aim was to make a complete edition of all of the 135,000 documents we have collected available in an inexpensive format that would be placed in public libraries, small colleges, and even high schools. This would provide an audience far beyond our present 1,000-copy, $45 published edition. Since the CD-ROM edition will carry none of the explanatory annotation that appears in the published volumes, we also feel that the use of the CD-ROM will lead many researchers to seek out the published volumes.
In addition to ignorance of new technical advances, I have found that too many editors—and historians and literary scholars—are resistant and even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their work. I intend to discuss some of the arguments traditionalists are advancing to resist technology, ranging from distrust of the speed with which it changes (we are already wondering what is out there that is better than CD-ROM) to suspicion of the technical language used to describe electronic developments.
Maria LEBRON
The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, a joint venture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), is the first peer-reviewed journal to provide full text, tabular material, and line illustrations on line. This presentation will discuss the genesis and start-up period of the journal. Topics of discussion will include historical overview, day-to-day management of the editorial peer review, and manuscript tagging and publication. A demonstration of the journal and its features will accompany the presentation.