Digital Presses Transform Librarians Into Entrepreneurs

By LISA GUERNSEY

It's an 1892 facsimile of the original 1841 edition, and it's full of detailed color scenes of American Indian tribes, along with 530 pages of Mr. Catlin's descriptions of their way of life. Once or twice a year, a student or scholar might request a look at the book, but most of the time, Manners sits undisturbed and under-appreciated -- like most rare books in library archives.

Last month, however, librarians here completed a digital project designed to bring Manners, along with three other books by Mr. Catlin, into the hands of more researchers. The librarians have created a two-disk CD-ROM that lets users examine prints related to descriptions from his books, link to passages in the texts, and search for images by subject.

What's unusual about the CDs is that the librarians want to sell them. The price: $499 for the two-disk CD set, $299 for one disk with a full index but with access to only some of the images.

Rare-books libraries used to simply archive their materials and provide them at no charge to patrons who came to the reading rooms. The project here offers a glimpse of a new role for curators of rare books and special collections -- that of publishers and revenue producers.

"In the good old days, librarians made things accessible and then gave them away," says Alice M. Cornell, editor of the Catlin project, who is also the university's archivist. Selling access had never crossed librarians' minds, she says. But digital technology has opened up new options: Now libraries can create CD-ROMs and sell copies, or set up World-Wide Web sites and sell licenses for access to what the sites contain.

After years of being content to preserve rare books for the occasional visitor, says Ms. Cornell, "we've come to think that good stewardship requires more."

Traditional duties are still central to the rare-books library's mission, but in a broader way, she says. Creating digital copies helps to preserve materials that deteriorate if they are handled too much. And CD-ROMs and Web sites offer access to new groups of users. Not only can scholars examine the materials from a distance, but they can also zoom in on tiny images, search through hundreds of pages within seconds, and explore intertextual connections that once would have taken hours, if not days, to track down.

Those were the advantages in Ms. Cornell's mind when she began the Catlin CD-ROM project three years ago. "We didn't start this as a publishing venture," she says. But David F. Kohl, the university librarian, suggested putting a price tag on the finished product.

"To do this digitally costs $30,000 to $40,000, and to make a second copy of the CD costs about a buck and a quarter," Mr. Kohl says. "We thought, If we sell this, maybe we can earn enough money to start preserving other things." Soon the eighth floor of the Carl Blegen Library was home to an unlikely entrepreneurial venture: the University of Cincinnati Digital Press.

Ms. Cornell and her technical and editorial assistants, Linda D. Newman and Juli Peters DeLong, squeezed the project into their workloads to make the press a reality. For months, Ms. Cornell pored over every image in Catlin's portfolios and books, cataloguing depictions of American bison, anklets, archery, and so on. She also created an index of names, places, objects, and ideas mentioned in the texts of the four works.

Ms. Newman and Ms. DeLong scanned lithographs from Catlin's works. A data base of the images was created with licensed software from Visual Information, a CD-ROM company in Denver. Some of the materials were borrowed from collections in Yale University's Beinecke Library and in the public library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County -- institutions that will receive a portion of the CD-ROMs' sales revenue. The librarians also digitized a copy of one of Mr. Catlin's maps to show where the Indian tribes that he described probably lived.

This hyperlinked map is part of a CD-ROM that the University of Cincinnati is marketing. The red dots correspond to the locations of American Indian tribes painted by the explorer George Catlin in the early 19th century. When a user clicks on the dots, a thumbnail of one of his paintings appears.

This month, the librarians are moving into marketing mode. "We have to let the world know that this is available," Ms. Newman says. They will place advertisements in The Western Historical Quarterly and American Indian Art, among other journals. They are organizing demonstrations at library conferences and sending introductory letters to museums with collections of Western Americana. They are about to order 2,500 ball-point pens inscribed with the logo of the University of Cincinnati Digital Press.

Pens with logos? From rare-book librarians?

Surprising as it may seem, librarians with special collections are becoming more aggressive about promoting their archives, says Edward Gaynor, director of the Special Collections Digital Center at the University of Virginia. Most large rare-books libraries now have Web sites that promote the resources in their collections. Nearly all such libraries have started to digitize their more-famous materials. Selling access to the digital collections, as Cincinnati is doing, may be just around the corner.

For example, librarians at Virginia, with the help of work-study students, are creating electronic versions of 18th-and 19th-century novels in their collection. The library is selling access to the materials through Chadwyck-Healey, an Alexandria, Va., publisher that markets on-line data bases. The project is not yet complete, but already institutions may subscribe to the Early American Fiction site on the Web for $1,500 to $2,500 per year, or may buy the whole package on CD-ROM for $10,000.

The university will receive a portion of the profits, which Mr. Gaynor hopes will help pay for new preservation projects. "We've got to look at ways to keep our collections going, our preservation going," he says.

Cornell University has set up a similar partnership with Primary Source Media, in Woodbridge, Conn., which is starting a publishing project called Rare Books Online. The company has created electronic texts and digital images from centuries-old monographs about witchcraft that Cornell holds in its rare-book collection. The digital archive is selling for $575 to $2,000, depending on the size of the institution buying access. In such deals, says Frank Menchaca, editorial director of Primary Source Media, libraries can earn 10 to 20 per cent of the selling price.

Not everything in a rare-books library is marketable, says Virginia's Mr. Gaynor. Some materials are too obscure. But for libraries with collections that are unique -- and in demand among scholars -- selling copies of digital archives seems "perfectly reasonable," he says. "Any institution that is wise at all is going to be looking at their collections with dollar signs in their eyes," says Mr. Gaynor.

But before university officials start dreaming of sales contracts and revenue streams, librarians warn, they must realize that these publishing projects can be very expensive, even if commercial companies cover the marketing and sales costs. And even after the items are digitized, a library will not spend any less on preserving and repairing the original items, which may be disintegrating or damaged -- and which are still critical to serious researchers.

Some digitizing projects are possible only with grants. At Virginia, for example, a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported the Early American Fiction project.

Mr. Gaynor says the only possible downside to selling digitized collections -- or even making them freely available -- is that donors might start to ask, Why support the preservation of rare books when you can see them on line? Virginia librarians are now studying whether the availability of digital copies means less -- or more -- traffic into their rare-book room. "There is still the artifactual value, the experience of putting your hands on Thomas Jefferson's architectural drawings or Walt Whitman's first Leaves of Grass," Mr. Gaynor says. "That can't be replaced." Those experiences are still free, except for the costs that researchers incur in traveling to see the collections.

It is not yet clear that the rare-book libraries' new products will actually bring in a substantial amount of money. Cornell's witchcraft data base was unveiled only last month, and Virginia's digitized collection is still in the works. But the Cincinnati project, which will be formally announced next week, has already received an order for the Catlin CDs. And librarians here hope that, at the very least, selling the CDs might bring more attention to their archives and more demand for digitized works.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," says Ms. Newman, the technical assistant here. Soon, Cincinnati's Digital Press will begin its next project, North American Indian Portraits in Print. The library is also considering putting the Catlin project on the Web, with a fee for access, but for now, she says, the image files are too big to move quickly over the Internet.

How many other untapped treasures may be hidden in the closed stacks of libraries like Cincinnati's? Today the items require so much care and gatekeeping that few people ever see them.

But if the materials can be digitally reincarnated, books like Catlin's Manners may take on two lives: one sitting silently in the shadows of a secured, 60-degree room, the other available around the world -- and subsidizing more rare-book projects through its virtual existence.

MARKETING RARE BOOKS: THREE DIGITAL PROJECTS

GEORGE CATLIN: THE PRINTED WORKS
The first project of the University of Cincinnati Digital Press

• Features prints and texts from four books by Catlin, a 19th-century explorer who wrote about American Indian tribes and illustrated his texts.

• Includes searchable texts and digital facsimiles, an image catalogue, and a hyperlinked index of ideas, names, and places described in the four books.

• Costs $499 for the two-volume CD-ROM set; $299 for one volume. Not available on the World-Wide Web.

• For information: http://www.ucdp.uc.edu/

ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE OF EARLY AMERICAN FICTION
To be published by the University of Virginia Library and Chadwyck-Healey

• Features 560 rare volumes of early American fiction by 81 authors. Provides digital facsimiles and searchable electronic texts of every page.

• Costs $1,500 to $2,500 a year for a license that gives access to the Web-based data base; costs $10,000 to get the data base on tape or CD-ROM. The university will receive an undisclosed percentage of the profits. (The first installment of the data base will be released this summer, but the full project is not expected to be completed until 1999.)

• For information: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/