COLUMBIA  LIBRARY COLUMNS
The Spring  1997 Ls.sui-.   j   Robkri  Sc:oii, Guest Editor
 

L
 

■ n 1986, recognizing the revolutionary
potential of electronic technology for

- humanities research, Anita K. Lowry
of Butler Library's Reference Department created the Electronic Text
Service (ETS), the first library department anywhere in the United States
(and perhaps the world) devoted specifically to the collecdon and use of
full-text source materials in electronic format for research and analysis. In
the decade since, outstanding electronic text centers have sprimg up at a
number of other libraries, a national organizational structure has grown up
around the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities, and the body of
available material has burgeoned, but the ETS has continued to grow along
with the field. Its collecdons today include tens of thousands of texts in
more than twelve languages and a variety of software tools for complex
searching, making concordances, collation of variant versions, markup of
structure and content, and other authoring and analysis tasks. The scope
and programs of the department are also extending in new direcdons. From
a collection primarily accessible via individual on-site workstations, it is
moving toward one providing a maximum number of resources over the
campus networks to individual offices and desktops. From an initial
emphasis on formally published materials, it has broadened its mission to
include assistance to users in acquiring reliable copies of more informally
produced materials or creating their own electronic versions of texts. And
finally, from a center whose early users were drawn primarily from the
faculty and graduate student population, it is working to reshape itself into
one providing more active support for undergraduate instruction as well,
beginning with a collection of searchable online electronic versions of many