Welcome and Preliminaries

Welcome to the Summer 2009 phase of the Transatlantic Fiction Project!

First, read this description (adapted from the successful Hungerford Grant application which is partially funding our summer work) of the goals, present state, and future possibilities of the Tranatlantic Fiction Project. (Accessing the pdf will require you to accept the invitation I sent you to sign up for a Dropbox account: https://www.getdropbox.com/home)

In a nutshell, the TFP aims to produce a database of information about early novels that allows researchers to search the kinds of information the novel itself offers us along with the kinds of information that bibliographers and scholars have discovered about the novel through their research.

By separating rather than conflating these two kinds of information, the TFP allows us to do things like search for all novels in the collection between 1780 and 1820 (search field 1) that claim to be "by a lady" on the title page (search field 2) and yet were later discovered to actually be authored by a man (search field 3).

What kinds of information are we interested in?

This document gives you a ROUGH sense of the sorts of categories of information that we are interested. This information comes from two sources. First, from the existing MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) record. A MARC record is the record of imformation about a book that the library holds in its catalog; when you search Tripod, for example, the information you get on a particular book is drawn from its MARC record. Look briefly at this presentation from the Penn library on MARC just to get a sense of what MARC is.

The rest of the information will come from the actual copies of the books themselves; you will be the ones extracting the information from the book and entering it into the template that Jon has created for us. (Training about how to do this will be all day on Friday, May 22nd.)

Another really innovative and exciting thing about our database is that it allows for the use of both very complicated faceted searching and more familiar keyword searches.

What is a faceted search? Essentially, in a faceted search database we assigned multiple facets, or classifications, to each of our novels, and then allow users to filter the set of novels (all nearly 3,000 of them) using multiple facets. Here are two examples of existing databases that allow faceted searching:

1.Penn's Fine Arts Library Image Collection

Note the different facets (categories) on the righthand sidebar.

2.Penn's Wheeler Collection

3. World Digital Library

By contrast, the existing database that is most like ours, British Fiction, 1800-1829
allows for basic and advanced keyword searches across its own information categories, but does not allow facet searching.

Do spend some time playing with the British Fiction database so that you know what it can – and can’t – do.

Yet another innovative aspect of the TFP will be the was we allow users to visualize and store their search results - maps, timelines, etc. More on this soon....

More to come!