Margaret Conrad
The
Atlantic Canada Portal |
http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca/
Introduction
A bilingual, multilayered website,
the Atlantic Canada Portal is designed to
explore the use of communication technology
to support research related to the Atlantic
Provinces of Canada. Launched in the summer
of 2004, the Portal is a collaborative effort
of the Canada Research Chair in Atlantic
Canada Studies and the Electronic Text Centre,
both based at the University of New Brunswick.
The Portal serves as a gateway
to information on the Atlantic region for
the benefit of researchers, students, and
the general public. To this end, it serves
as a digital library of primary and secondary
sources, including bibliographies, theses,
archival documents, reports, and teaching
aids. It also supports communications among
scholars by hosting virtual communities of
learning, posting e-prints, and maintaining
an electronic mailing list. While academic
researchers, broadly defined, are the main
audience for the Portal, we increasingly
find that our site attracts a diversity of
people interested in aspects of the Atlantic
regions history and culture.
Atlantic
Canada Bibliography
One
of the first projects undertaken by the
Portal team was to develop an online database
of bibliographies published in Acadiensis:
The Journal of the History of the Atlantic
Region. The online version of the bibliography,
encoded in XML and in accordance with the
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines,
enables text processing, complex searches,
accepts titles that our users notice are
missing, and permits us to correct the
mistakes that invariably creep into any
large database. Time and money permitting,
we will also develop a subject index that
will make the bibliography even more efficient
in tracking topics.
The text files for the first
segment of the bibliography (post-1939) were
converted from word processing formats to
XML through a series of Perl scripts. The
second segment (pre-1939) was converted to
electronic format using OCR software, TextBridge and Adobe
Capture. With their complex structure
and punctuation, article entries were the
most difficult to convert to XML. Nevertheless,
the project programmer achieved 80% automation.
The project used the XML TEI
Lite DTD from the (Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines
to Document Creation and Interchange),
with only slight modifications. TEI is an
international and interdisciplinary standard
used to represent texts for online research
and teaching. The project
team at UNB modelled part of its encoding on the Emblem Project Utrecht's application
of the TEI Guidelines (see http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/html/index.html).
The project used the XMLSpy editor for
text encoding.
After the bibliographic information
was encoded in XML, a MySQL relational database
was designed to store the source XML data.
The database design is based on the structure
of the encoded information for books, articles,
and theses. An on-line administration system
was developed to allow creation or editing
of individual references. The administration
system interface is written in HTML, using
PHP scripts to generate dynamic content and
to handle database interactions.
Following the creation of the
database, a web interface was developed through
which bibliography contents can be viewed.
The interface offers basic and advanced search
options, and a browse feature that provides
lists of references ordered by title or author.
The interface is written in HTML and, again,
PHP scripting is used to generate dynamic
page content. Users enter search criteria
that are passed to PHP utilities that interact
with the database to search the fields specified
in the users query. Where a match
occurs, the source <biblStruct> XML
for a particular record is retrieved. XSL
stylesheets are applied to the retrieved
XML and transformed using Sablotron, an XSLT,
DOM and XPath processor. The transformation
generates HTML output, which is then delivered
to the users web browser.
Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives
The
Atlantic Canada Portal also hosts an
(Atlantic
Canada Virtual Archives),
which is
designed to showcase some of Atlantic Canada's
rich archival sources and to explore the
potential of web-based research. In this
phase of the project, undertaken in 2003-04,
two frequently-consulted archival collections
have been digitized for online delivery: the
Winslow Family Papers, housed
in the University of New Brunswick Archives
and Special Collections, and the McQueen
Family Papers located in the Nova Scotia
Archives and Records Management, and in three
repositories in British Columbia the
British Columbia Archives, the Nicola Valley
Museum Archives Association, and the Rossland
Historical Museum & Archives.
Edward Winslow (1746-1815)
was prominent Massachusetts Loyalist who
settled in New Brunswick following the American
Revolutionary War. A prolific and gifted
letter writer, Winslow offers an intimate
account of the Loyalist experience of re-establishing
family and community life in colonial New
Brunswick. Over 260 letters written to and
from Edward Winslow between 1783 and 1785
have been transcribed and the Winslow Family
Papers (1695-1866), consisting of over 3600
items, have been imaged.
The
McQueen family letters chronicle in often
breath-taking detail the activities and
relationships of a farming family rooted
in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in the second
half of the nineteenth century. All but
one of the six daughters and the only surviving
son taught school at some point in their
lives, moving around Nova Scotia and, in
the case of the two youngest daughters,
to British Columbia, to teach. A highly
mobile family, they kept in touch by writing
letters that speak to us today as remarkable
documents of Canadian social history. The
letters written between 1866 and 1890 have
been transcribed and coded to facilitate
searches and the entire collection of over
1200 documents has been imaged.
The Learning resources developed
for this project by Martin L’Heureux
are especially fun for students of all ages
as they practice writing with a quill pen
and are obliged, like Edward Winslow, to
dip the pen in ink regularly to be able to
continue writing. In the case of the McQueens,
students travel with Jessie McQueen on the
recently-completed Canadian Pacific Railway
across Canada in March 1888, reading the
letters and postcards that she wrote en route
from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, to Nicola
Valley, British Columbia, where she had been
hired to teach school.
The
project team imaged, transcribed, and developed
interfaces for the McQueen and Winslow
collections following applicable XML and
imaging industry standards. (For those
interested in the technical details, see http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca/acv/en/winslow/about/index.php).
We
hope that these archival resources become
the first of many more for the site, but
the costs of large projects such as these
are daunting. At its height some 29 people,
including 13 students, were employed to
help transcribe, image, and encode the
letters. Only a grant from the Canadian
Culture Online Program of Canadian Heritage,
and donations in time and money from a
great many people, made such a labour-intensive
project possible.
Communities of Learning
As well as bibliographies and primary
sources, we have a pass-protected area on the
Portal called Communities of Learning that
facilitates team-based research and knowledge
mobilization. For example, one of the Communities
of Learning on the site is devoted to a team
researching Health Inequities in Atlantic Canada
using lone mothers as a case study. The 13
members of the research team post papers, messages,
and links on the site and work together across
any distance to build a bibliography or write
a paper. When the project is completed we can
use the site to disseminate our bibliographies
and research papers to whoever wants to read
them.
E-Prints and Repositories
The E-Print
section of the Portal allows us to explore
the potential of electronic publishing. In
this regard, we sometimes raise eye-brows
among print-oriented publishers. Scholarly
communication via the Internet is increasingly
causing the interests of the scholar and
the publisher to diverge. While commercial
publishing often brings in revenue, scholars
rarely receive anything for publishing their
articles in refereed journals and the time
between submission and publication of ones
work is usually measured in years. As Stevan
Harnad is fond of reminding us, a refereed
scholarly website can reduce that time frame
considerably while also enabling threaded
online discussions, automated indexing, accessibility
to research data, broad dissemination, and
much more (http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/)
Scholars are now demanding that websites
be institutionally supported and that attention
be paid to permanence of content, versioning,
security, and adherence to technical standards.
The university-based repository offers scholars
a way of managing and disseminating their
research in digital form and archiving it
for posterity. There is also potential for
federating the repositories into one virtual
space, a process that would greatly facilitate
online searches. Part of the package is a
university commitment to manage technological
change in such as way as to ensure the migration
of digital content from one set of technologies
to another. Clifford A. Lynch, Executive
Director of the US-based Coalition for Networked
Information, argues that:
"At the most basic
and fundamental level, an institutional
repository is a recognition
that the intellectual life and scholarship
of our universities will increasingly be
represented, documented, and shared in digital
form, and that a primary responsibility of
our universities is to exercise stewardship
over these riches: both to make them available
and to preserve them." (http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html)
The
team involved in the Atlantic Canada Portal
Project is especially attentive to the
archival demands of the new technology
and will be experimenting with DSpace
and
other repository software in the near future.
Challenges Facing Portal Development
The
biggest problem facing researchers interested
in engaging the Internet is funding. To
find the time to actually do research,
scholars need programmers and web masters
to support them. While funding agencies
recognize that scientists need labs, they
are less convinced that humanities and
social science scholars do and so it is
difficult to find the funds to make the
Atlantic Canada Portal more than a passive
receptor of information. We spend a lot
of time chasing soft money
to enable us to keep our increasingly skilled
Portal team of scholars, students, and
technicians together.
It is, we believe, vitally
important that scholars in the humanities
and social sciences share our knowledge and
compete for user attention in cyber space.
Students increasingly expect to find their
sources on the Internet and scholarly research
is greatly facilitated by online resources.
While the cost of embedding ourselves in
the digital world is great both in terms
of time and money, so, too, is the rest of
the infrastructure that serves the academy.
Although we expect there to be difficult
adjustments to make as we continue to ride
this new communications technology to its
final destination, we will be increasingly
invisible if we do not have an institutionally-supported,
user-friendly Internet presence.
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