This brief tour follows along with the headings found in the body of:

Linking The Americas

A Project Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Final Report

Stanford University Libraries & Stanford University Press

28 September 2000

Summary from the report:

The Linking the Americas project succeeded in converting to digital form and mounting on the Internet a collection of books pertaining to Latin America that had been published conventionally by the Stanford University Press. In addition, some rare and manuscript materials from Stanford's Special Collections have also been converted and mounted. This project has taught a variety of lessons in both policy and production issues surrounding digitization of previously published materials. The Stanford University Libraries are pleased to acknowledge the support and patience of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the evolution of this project, the fruits of which may be examined at http://lta.stanford.edu.

Review of Project Activities

Conversion of Monographs

Linking the Americas is posted on Latin American partner sites at University of California, Berkeley [ What's New ] and University of Texas, Austin.


For access to Chile en los noventa and Chile in the Nineties, click here.

Conversion of other collections

Materials converted from Special Collections are summarized at:
            Travel Accounts -- Brazil
            Chilean Imprints
            Literary and Film Magazines
            Literary Source Material

With respect to delivery of PDFs via ebrary, the following excerpts come from a letter by Christopher Warnock, ebrary’s CEO, regarding access to the files supplied by Stanford.  Once we have access to our PDFs through their interface, we’ll add their icon to the title listings in LTA.

In June of this year we put our development of Acrobat Plug-ins on hold, in favor of shipping with a product that still utilizes PDF, and all of the advantages that it offers, but instead is viewed without the client having either Adobe Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader installed on their system.

We believe these advantages to be significant, which is why we have chosen this development path, needless to say, this has added some time to our development schedule and consequently we had to revise our launch date to October 15th.

In the mean time, we are planning to give you access to the files that you provided to us in early October, if this will meet your schedule needs.

For a representative example of our experience w/ OCR of raw TIFFs, go to the title page from one issue of Revista do Brasil.  Some of the words that were picked up include:

     - bello      despite its being part of a highly stylized font that masked
                     most of the words when it was present
     - brasil     comes through in the smallish font, but was hidden in the headline
     - ipublicacao & pagina
                     both came through as well (diacritics & small/faint)

Access

A sampling of the HTML interface can be had via:
            - exploring tables of content for Postconquest Coyoacan
            - using the path to and back from footnotes
            - viewing HTML/as-printed versions of
                        tables and table as printed
                        graphics and map as printed
            - searching for citations in Stanford’s union catalog via links, e.g.
                        Cook, Sherburne F ., and Woodrow Borah. 1971, 1974, 1979
                          Essays in Population History. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press
           

NOTE: In terms of URLs pointing from the union catalog to titles within the LTA holdings, Stanford is in the process of installing managed access to digital content such that pointers to digital assets will be based on a unique ID for each asset. That ID will be resolved to the location(s) and format(s) and version(s) available for any asset. Rather than duplicate the work for the LTA titles by building those 856 URLs in the union catalog via outdated methods soon to be replaced, and then editing to conform to the new process, we’ve opted to include LTA resources in the new method of delivery. Full linking will go into place during fall quarter.

Searching within titles relies on searches carried out within the delivery vehicle for each format -- Adobe PDF searches on OCRs of TIFFs, searches within and across ebooks uses the Versaware interface that requires one to create a personal environment before one can search across titles.

Within the LTA web site, and number of access paths are provided, including:
            - single word searches of citations, results listed by headings , brief title , etc.
            - browsing lists (author, title, subject) listed by headings , brief title , etc.
            - lists by geographic coverage, format , and type of material
            - note that brief citations include icons that point to the formats available for a title

              titles available for purchase from the Press

             titles viewable in Versaware’s HTML interface

              titles for purchase from Versaware

              Latin American titles for which only Library copies exist

The online sales vehicles for the SU Press titles are summarized under Purchase Titles on the site.

Of note are the automatic citation editing tools that were created for LTA.  The headings, brief citations, full citations, indexes, and sort strings for all entries are built automatically by a set of routines that dynamically extract data from the MARC records in our union catalog, convert the character set to HTML equivalents, format headings and citations for display, and create the text and browse-sort indexes to support the LTA interface.  These tools will get heavy use in the next phase of SUL’s work on management of digital assets.  In those efforts we expect to rely on dynamic links between digital asset management middleware and the union catalog to provide display access to citation data without storing multiple copies of citations.