Wednesday, June 5, 2002

New Zealand University Opens E-Text Center in Partnership With U. of Virginia By DAVID COHEN Wellington, New Zealand New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington has become the latest institution of higher learning to benefit from a campaign by the University of Virginia to establish electronic-text centers abroad. The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre was officially opened last month at a ceremony in Wellington, the national capital, attended by David M. Seaman, the director of UVa's Electronic Text Center, which works with the university's libraries to create digital copies of scholarly and literary books. It was the third "international outreach" event for Mr. Seaman, whose 10-year-old facility at UVa, in Charlottesville, has established similar centers at the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, and Australia's University of Sydney. The Virginia center is working with the University of Puerto Rico on a project aimed at creating an electronic database of older Caribbean literature. It is also working on projects with researchers from Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. While capital and staffing costs are met by each university, Virginia has kept the institutions' overhead expenses relatively low by agreeing to share its own software and expertise with each of the centers, according to Mr. Seaman. In return, the UVa center gets to expand its own collection of more than 70,000 e-texts by adding significant foreign-based works that could not be readily brought online if the operation were confined to Charlottesville. The Virginia center says it has had hundreds of thousands of online visitors from more than 190 countries and territories, who between them used some 3.3 million documents. In addition to its English-language texts, the center publishes material in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Latin, and Apache. The New Zealand center will establish a searchable electronic archive of colonial texts and writings from the 19th century, when the modern country was founded. The new center also plans to make available digital copies of the early writings of authors such as Katherine Mansfield, the logbooks of the explorer James Cook, and other old texts no longer covered by copyright. It expects to process up to 100 novel-length e-texts over the coming year, according to Elizabeth H. Styron, its director. Ms. Styron, a former graduate student at UVa who worked at the parent Electronic Text Center, said she believed that literature related to New Zealand's Maori people could ultimately be of the most interest to international researchers. The Maori were Polynesian explorers who settled this country around the 1200s and who now account for around 17 percent of its four million inhabitants. American scholars "who might have any interest or need to study this aspect of the country's literature have nowhere to go online right now," Ms. Styron said. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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