Apr. 17, 2000


Electronic Text Service, Which Enhances Faculty And Student Research, Opens New Facility

Columbia political science graduate student Eleonora Pasotti set out to conduct research for her dissertation, as many students do, by visiting Butler Library. But along the way, Pasotti discovered a resource that is allowing her to perform a level of analysis rarely done before in her field of study.

Using equipment and software in the library's Electronic Text Service facility, Pasotti found a way to scan thousands of microfilm images of newspapers, convert them to text and search them for specific keywords and themes.

"It totally changed the character of my dissertation," she said.

ETS, which opened in 1987 as the country's first library department devoted exclusively to the collection and use of full-text source materials in electronic format, is making strides once more to become a leader in the ever-changing technological arena -- this time by moving to a new facility on Butler's third floor and updating and expanding its offerings for students and faculty.

ETS, which officially moved from the fifth floor to its new home March 16, aims to help faculty and students incorporate computer-based textual information into research and teaching. In addition to offering thousands of machine-readable primary source texts, the service provides software that can be used to critically analyze texts in unique ways.

"This is an increasingly important area of scholarship and research," said Michael Stoller, director of humanities and history libraries. "It's growing geometrically, and we'd like to think that we're on the cutting edge of that growth."

The in-depth study of texts now possible here can exponentially improve research projects, according to ETS head Robert Scott. For example, a student studying a particular Greek author can determine how that author was influenced by another by searching for a word, phrase or theme common to both.

In Pasotti's case, she was able to determine how political discourse developed in Naples, Italy, by tracking the use of key terms in the city's local newspaper during the early 1990s.

ETS also provides database research tools in the humanities, many of which may be accessed on the World Wide Web. For those on-line resources, ETS serves as a training ground for students and faculty members who wish to learn how best to use them.

But ETS's reach is far from limited to its physical or on-line holdings. Researchers who don't find what they are looking for can create their own electronic resources or comprehensive text databases. Digital scanning is also available for materials including microfilm and slides, making reviewing newspaper text like Pasotti wished to do -- once a cumbersome task conducted in a dark room at a microfilm reader -- easy.

"Our vision is for people to be able to look at any kind of text with this kind of critical analysis," Scott said. "You can begin to see things about a text you might not have noticed on the surface."

Scott said he expects more users to take advantage of the newly renovated facility and its 24 computers. The new ETS area also contains a special classroom that will be used to train faculty and students to use electronic resources.

The relocation of ETS is part of Phase II of the larger Butler Library renovation project. Several parts of Phase II have already been completed, including renovations to the second floor and to several parts of the third floor. The third-floor catalog room opened in March with tables and chairs for studying; books will be added after the semester ends. The third-floor undergraduate reading room is set to open for studying in April, and books will be brought in later. Interlibrary Loan and Reference and Collection Maintenance staff areas on the third floor are set to be completed in May, and a renovated Information Resources Training Lab will wrap up Phase II in June.

Library officials are now preparing to launch Phase III of the renovation project, which will include work on floors 4, 5 and 6 and on stack levels 7-11. After the spring semester ends, officials will begin replacing the library's main elevators and will close the east side of the fourth floor for construction. The new elevators should be up and running by September, and the east side of the fourth floor is expected to be completed by January.

ETS is open from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Friday. For more information, call 854-7547 or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/ets/. For more details on the renovation project, see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/butler_ren/.