ROADS Gateway Update - Alex - Issue 9 - July 1999

Some new features of the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts

By Eric Lease Morgan, Systems Librarian, NCSU Libraries <eric_morgan@ncsu.edu>

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts uses the ROADS software to provide access to digital versions of Western philosophy texts as well as American and English literature. The Catalogue has used the extensibility of ROADS' template records to enhance its functionality. To date, these enhancements have been: 1) the on-demand creation of PDF documents from the Catalogue's collection, 2) "bookcases" -- personalized collections of Catalogue items, and 3) the ability to search the content of Catalogue items with extensive Boolean operations and pattern matching via WAIS.

Two new enhancements to the Catalogue are in progress: 1) subject/genre access and 2) traditional concordance functions. I have always wanted to read pieces of fiction that were about particular topics; I was never really interested in particular authors. Unfortunately, topical access to fiction has always been problematic since, in general, librarianship frowns on describing fiction in terms of its "aboutness". Enlisting the help of an enthusiastic, hard-working, and dedicated cataloger, subject and genre headings are being added to the items of the Catalogue. Through this process a cataloging policy will be articulated and new acquisitions to the Catalogue will be regularly assigned topical access points. Once finished, subject and genre access to Catalogue items will be available via a browsable as well as a searchable interface implemented by the ROADS infrastructure.

After attending a literary conference earlier this year, I learned concordances are still in vogue for students and researchers of literature and linguistics. Consequently I got in touch with William A. Williams, Jr. who maintains a website called Concordances of Great Books. In exchange for prominent recognition of his work, Williams licensed me his Perl code implementing the concordance functionality. I am now in the process of integrating this functionality into Alex. Using the concordance functions a user can count the number of times particular words appear in a text and then view those words in context. After a few wrinkles get worked out, searches against a Catalogue item's concordance will be integrated into the Alex bookcase feature. To see how it works now, visit the following URL, search for "finn", and select "Use concordance" from the resulting text:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex/

I would now like to sing the praises of the ROADS software. After downloading the software, I have gotten much more than what I paid for. The application functions as advertized. Support has been abundant. Documentation has been clear. Installation was painless. But more importantly, the software allowed me to create a service that is flexible, customizable, and powerful. If, using the ROADS software, libraries were to aggressively collect and maintain lists of discipline-specific Internet resources, and if those libraries then turn-on the cross-searching functionality of ROADS, then the Internet could truly benefit from a large, authoritative collection of Internet resources. It has been a joy working with ROADS.

Eric "My Data Is Your Data" Lease Morgan
Digital Library Initiatives Department, NCSU Libraries
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/

Issue 9 July 1999