Pelikan's Antidisambiguation: Editions, Tweaks, and User Preferences

Against the Grain Volume 27 | Issue 2 Article 44 2015 Pelikan's Antidisambiguation: Editions, Tweaks, and User Preferences Michael P. Pelikan Penn State, Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Pelikan, Michael P. (2015) "Pelikan's Antidisambiguation: Editions, Tweaks, and User Preferences," Against the Grain: Vol. 27: Iss. 2, Article 44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7068 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact for additional information. in a print world, enjoyed Sardanapalian benefits, are trying to recapture those cash cows in bits and bytes but with little success. It isn’t so easy, but they’re discovering it is much cheaper to print an electronic book while dropping the price only marginally. Like online courses at war with classroom ones, online books are going to be cheaper and provide a greater return on investment. That ROI does not necessarily include what students are investing in, however. If eBook reading increased 200%, it would still have a way to go before it caught up with print reading if measured in terms of value received and retained. What this means for libraries is obvious, isn’t it? We still have to collect and support both for the time being, in the same way that we have for years supported microfilm and bound periodical volumes. Microform reading only caught on when there was no other choice. I would find it surprising if eBooks end up in the same dustbin. Microform-reading was never easier, better, or more convenient. Nothing about it enticed the reader. Its only attraction was a pedestrian one: it saved space while still providing access, even if a difficult one. eBooks have already shown their value in the benefits mentioned above, but also in leisure reading. None of us really like lugging suitcases of print books with us on vacation (my long-suffering wife will argue that she knows at least one person). Having the ability to take literally hundreds appeals to those of us with eyes larger than our brains. But when it comes to scholarship that must be recalled and remembered, few of us will choose the electronic text over its printed counterpart. I believe this to be more a facility of evolution and practice rather than something inherently hard-wired in us. Unless or until we can rewire our brains — and, for better or for worse, online reading is doing that — we will read both formats, depending on the subject matter and/or reason for reading. I haven’t had time to sift through the new literacy report, so I cannot speak to how well or to what extent the issue of online reading contributes to the strength or weakness of it. If the students in the Rosenwald story are right, and if my own research in this subject matter is at all correct, it may well unravel many of the gains we have made in recent decades. Poor readers, especially, will have a much tougher time going forward if they must learn to read digitally first. If that continues, we will see future generations underperforming when compared with their past peers. Little Red Herrings from page 73 Subscription Management Solutions for Libraries & Corporate Procurement Subscription management Prenax Inc. provides subscription E-journal URL maintenance management solutions for procurement Click-through access to e-content professionals and libraries. 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Prenax Inc. 10 Ferry Street, Suite 429, Concord, NH 03301 (P) 603-229-0662 (F) 603-226-9443 www.basch.com www.prenax.com And so, the print versus online debate continues in its ironies, even as you read this article first in print, or, if you come to it much later online. Pelikan’s Antidisambiguation — Editions, Tweaks, and User Preferences Column Editor: Michael P. Pelikan (Penn State) <> I ’ve made comments before in this space about problems that continue to plague eBook projects that begin with out-ofcopyright print sources. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has improved hugely over the past ten or fifteen years, but achieving the last incremental improvements that would bring it close to practical perfection has proven difficult. Even if achievable, near-perfect OCR would do nothing to address the backlog we’ve accumulated of poor OCR’d texts, many of which, as mentioned, are out of copyright. This means there’s not a lot of financial incentive to promote investment in retrospectively repairing past results of flawed OCR projects. This came up for me again recently whilst reading, for only the second time in my life, the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Against the Grain / April 2015 My first encounter with this material was through Project Gutenberg. It came in the form of a pure ASCII text file. It had line endings and carriage returns, but nothing more exotic than that. The file itself was not the product of OCR. Instead, it was typed by true enthusiasts: candidates for sainthood who felt strongly enough about a particular book to take on the task of transcribing as an entire work from printed page into keystrokes, for the good of the World. The quality of transcription of many such works was variable, but improved over time. This was not in small measure because other folks came along and began to make corrections to the hand-built editions, in a way somewhat similar to how a wiki article can be improved over time. Better, in some ways, because there were fewer matters relying upon subjective interpretation, at least in the case of same-language transcriptions — either it was correct or not. I don’t really understand, if a human-generated, even curated, transcription exists, why the builders and publishers of e-texts don’t take advantage of them. Why start from scratch and apply machine-driven OCR to printed text if there’s already a transcription? Many, perhaps most, such transcriptions are freely available and could be used — it would cost only attribution and recognition of the source, something I’d perhaps wrongly assume that even t (...truncated)