18.462 ALA Electronic Text Centers Discussion Group, Boston, 15/1

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 462.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 07:14:28 +0000
         From: Robert Scott <scottr_at_columbia.edu>
         Subject: Electronic Text Centers Discussion Group at ALA

If you are going to be at the Mid-Winter meeting of the American Library
Association in Boston, I urge you to come to the gathering of the
Electronic Text Center Discussion group, which will take place from 2:00 to
4:00 in the Copley Room of the Hilton Back Bay on Saturday, January 15, 2004.

   The main topic of our meeting is one that I am sure is on many of your
minds . Google's recently unveiled plan for extensive digitization of
material from the collections of Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and
New York Public and the potentially revolutionary implications of that
project for the electronic collection building now taking place in so many
libraries across this country. I am pleased to report that Adam Smith,
project manager of the Google Print program, has agreed to come to our
meeting to answer our questions and to get a better sense of the hopes and
possible concerns that this revolutionary project has raised in the broader
Etext community. I hope that those of you who represent some of the
participating libraries will also be able to attend and lend your voices to
what I trust will be a very interesting discussion.

If time permits, I would also like to at least begin addressing what was
originally to have been the main theme of our meeting, namely, a discussion
about slightly refocusing and rethinking the program of this group, and the
selection of a new convener.

I look forward to seeing you in Boston.

Bob Scott
Head, Electronic Text Service
Columbia University Libraries
Received on Thu Jan 06 2005 - 02:33:36 EST