Indiana Authors and Their Books

• Host: Indiana University
• URL: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/inauthors
• Main language: English

General description: Indiana Authors and Their Books (Indiana Authors) is an LSTA-funded project based on the digitization and encoding of the 3-volume reference work Indiana Authors and Their Books, which initially identified approximately 150 monographs by selected authors from Indiana’s Golden Age of Literature (1880-1920). Since its original conception, the project grew in scope as a test-bed for "productionizing" e-text workflows in partnership with the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Technical Services department. Another 200 texts in the public domain, and, at the time not yet digitized as part of the Google Books initiative, were selected for electronic conversion. Although the encyclopedic 3-volume reference work is at the center of this project, the online Indiana Authors resource is being launched in phases, with an initial focus on the encoded monographs that will be fully integrated with the encyclopedia by late Spring 2012. This newest release of the Indiana Authors project includes approximately 250 monographs.

Indiana Authors and Their Books will provide students, educators, researchers, and the general public, in Indiana and throughout the world, with a searchable reference tool that will draw from unique state resources, link biographical sketches of famous Hoosier authors to full text electronic texts, and make Indiana’s rich literary history available online. A three-volume encyclopedia, Indiana Authors and Their Books, provides the framework for this project. Published over several decades, the comprehensive work attempts to include a biographical entry and a complete bibliography for all book authors who were born, raised, or educated in Indiana, or who lived in the state for a major portion of their lives. Among the 7,000 entries are many famous Hoosier authors from Indiana’s first 100 years of statehood, including Theodore Dreiser, Gene Stratton Porter, James Whitcomb Riley, and Booth Tarkington. The bio-bibliographic entries will link to digitized full-text editions of representative works by the most famous authors, and has provided a foundation for future development, including the addition of more full text editions by other Hoosier authors.

Implementation description: Of the approximately 350 monographs that are currently part of the Indiana Authors Project, 150 of those were produced through an LSTA-funded grant. The full texts were generated and then encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML) following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, TEI Lite version P4, at a Level 3 as described in the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries. Starting in 2009, the Digital Library Program partnered with the IUB Libraries Technical Services Department to continue encoding additional texts not included in the original grant proposal. In this next round of encoding, full text is generated with optical character recognition (OCR) software that is then ported into automatically created TEI templates ready for additional markup. The TEI templates contain a pre-populated header with bibliographic metadata from MARC records and other boilerplate metadata along with automatic insertion of page breaks. The Technical Services team adds the additional structural markup to conform to Level 3 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries. Technical Services plans to complete encoding of the remaining monographs beyond those covered under the original LSTA grant.

The delivery and discovery capabilities of this site are implemented using a customized version of the open source eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) developed by the California Digital Library. It is served using the Tomcat application server and Apache HTTP Server software. Local customizations to XTF at Indiana University include a unique native page image viewer and a page turner that are both driven exclusively by the information encoded in the source TEI files and require no additional software beyond what can be accomplished by customizing XTF's XSLT templates. This feature enables switching between text and page images at any time while navigating a document's structure, and allows viewing of one or more page images as moveable overlays simultaneously with the text in the paged text mode. The actual page images are stored and delivered via the IU Digital Library Program's Fedora repository. The encoded texts are stored in a local e-text repository called Xubmit, which was developed by the IU Digital Library Program. Xubmit is comprised of web services using Java and Axis, the Revision Control System (RCS) for file versioning, and a graphical user interface developed in Java that is delivered using the Tomcat application server. Along with the XML/TEI P4 files, Xubmit stores the schema and Schematron files for the project.

Copyright information: Indiana University makes no claim of copyright to the original texts, which have been published before 1923 and are, therefore, in the public domain. Permission is granted to download, transmit or otherwise reproduce, distribute or display the original texts so long as the header is included in its entirety.
Indiana University makes a claim of copyright only to original contributions made by the Indiana Authors participants. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, is strictly prohibited without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Determination of the status of an online document ultimately rests with the person desiring to reproduce or use the item. If you have any questions or for general inquiries, contact the Indiana University Digital Library Program, diglib@indiana.edu.

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