Text Class Overview

From DLXS Documentation

Revision as of 09:03, 15 September 2007

Main Page > Mounting Collections: Class-specific Steps > Mounting a Text Class Collection > Text Class Overview

The Text Class consists primarily of monographic material (books and pamphlets), but material such as journals, especially when converted from print and not subject to ongoing work, and letters can also be included. Whether current publishing or historical, whether the work was composed/edited for electronic distribution or print, whether the texts have been fully encoded or are automatically generated from raw OCR and a MARC record, these works are all:

1. extended text, typically of prose, verse, or drama, and (significantly) combinations of these;
2. typically with a high degree of structure;
3. and frequently drawn together in large groups or collections

Although materials in the proposed Reference Class may become a part of such a collection, we tend to think of members of the Text Class as having a less predictable structure and application. While the typical uses of these materials have much to do with the behaviors we apply to them (e.g., members of the Text Class are often read at length or analyzed for linguistic purposes; a member of the proposed Reference Class is more typically consulted for information), we focus here primarily on the great variability of their organization and the relatively large bodies of material that are assembled. These two factors converge to lead us to treat the organizational characteristics more generically. In an important way, this class more than any other serves as a base class from which new classes grow or can be defined. For more information about the DLPS Classes model, please see the DLPS Classes Overview.

The Text Class can federate text collections for searching, but also allows access to each collection individually. Access minimally includes full text searching across collections or within a particular collection, bibliographic searching within document metadata, browsing by author or title, and creation of personal collections of texts.

Text Class also has the following capabilities:

• Allows search and retrieval of electronic texts and portions thereof
• Allows searching across multiple collections simultaneously
• Allows searching of each collection independently
• Displays a text as HTML and/or as a page image, as appropriate
• Allows bookmarking of individual texts
• Requires minimal administrative data
• Uses a single data model and shared middleware for all collections in the system
• Permits access restrictions at the collection level

At the University of Michigan, the Text Class access system is administered by the Digital Library Production Service, Encoded Text Services. Encoded Text Services receives data in SGML or XML on a periodic basis from a variety of organizations on and off campus, and handles the process of putting the data online in a production-level environment.

Text Class provides no functionality for creating and managing electronic texts in SGML or XML.

Typical Sources of Data

The following sources of data have influenced the process defining the Text Class. Other sources are possible.

• Libraries: electronic texts and collections, both fully encoded and page images with OCR
• Publishers: both "born digital" and retrospectively converted texts
• Scholars/authors: electronic texts to support their research and/or teaching

Typical Applications of the Class

• Campus access
• Public access

Behaviors of the Text Class

• Cross-collection searching in any combination of collections
• Selection of collections by name or by attributes such as period covered, genre, etc.
• Collection-specific searching
• Simple, Boolean, Proximity, and Bibliography searching
• Searching within a user-selected text
• Ability to review and revise previous searches
• Browsing, either by a limited set of elements in the HEADER (author, title, subject), or with the "word wheel"
• Viewing of sections of a text or the full text in HTML (when available), page images (when available), or both (when applicable)

General Parameters

Electronic texts and electronic versions of previously printed monographs are available in SGML or XML from a number of sources, encoded in a number of different DTDs or schemas. While the content of each text is unique, the structure of each text is similar and often encoded in generalizable ways. The Text Class federates collections at the point of access in order to best support the diversity of texts and encoding practices.

This diversity becomes evident when searching across databases is attempted. It is a considerable achievement that the Text Class supports cross-collection searching, and that it does so without forcing all collections to be encoded at the same level. All collection specific elements are available to the user for search and display when doing a collection specific search. In the cross-collection search, all of the elements that the collections have in common are available; when a collection with a very low level of encoding is included, full-text searching may be the only option presented.

Dynamics

The data structure and behaviors of the Text Class best serve the functional requirements of collections of electronic texts grouped by genre, subject, or some other unifying theme. Individual texts can be served alone, but the methods and behaviors of the class will treat the text as a collection containing one item only.

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