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Indiana University Libraries will lead a three-year cooperative project among Big Ten
universities to digitize nearly 3,000 works of 19th-century American
fiction. The resulting collection of electronic texts will be freely
available via the Web.
Compiled by Lyle Wright in his 1957 bibliography, American Fiction 1851 1875, the works include novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales and allegories. The bibliography is part of Wright's three-volume work listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, which is considered the best bibliography of American adult fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries. Included are famous authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Hos and Herman Melville, as well as many lesser known or forgotten authors. "This was a momentous period in American history," said IU's Perry Willett, bibliographer for English and American literature and coordinator of the digitization project, "but American literature was still in its infancy. A searchable electronic collection will provide insight into American culture, literature and history otherwise unattainable." Researchers, for example, will be able to search by keyword the entire texts of the 2,832 digitized works. IU Libraries staff will convert 800,000 microfilm page images to text
files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and create a
searchable database of the texts. Participating research libraries will
edit, encode and proofread the text files. In their first cooperative and jointly funded digital project, the CIC member institutions will share expertise in the three-year effort and make significant works of American literature available to scholars worldwide. IU has considerable experience digitizing important literature. The IU Bloomington-based Victorian Women Writers Project, a source for the works by British women from the Victorian period, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of the best humanities sites on the World Wide Web and rated "superior" by Britannica.com, the Web site of Encyclopedia Britannica.
The collection from this 25-year period dovetails neatly with a number of other large electronic text collections, including Chadwyck-Healey's "Early American Fiction" which ends at 1850:
and the University of Michigan and Cornell University's "Making of
America," which covers 1850-1877 but excludes fiction: |
