Electronic Representations of Primary Sources on the Web

What Are Electronic Texts?


Definition of Electronic Text:

Text available in machine-readable or computerized form. The text may be saved on magnetic media, such as diskettes or hard drives, or on optical media, such as CD-ROMs.


How are E-Texts Created?


How are E-Texts Delivered to Users?



Primary Sources

Primary sources are heavily used for research and teaching in the humanities.

Definition of a primary source from the Yale University Library Primary Sources Research Colloquium: "A primary source is firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation."

Original texts and manuscripts are collected by libraries and museums all over the world. To use these texts, scholars and researchers are required to travel, sometimes at great expense in time and money, to the sites where the materials they study are housed. When these resources are converted into electronic texts, they can be saved on magnetic or optical media and transmitted over a network, making them available remotely.


Examples of Primary Sources on the Web

African-American pamphlets from the Library of Congress' American Memory Collections

Tetreault and Graver: Versions of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Civil War letters: The Booker Collection at UVa

This collection is transcribed and marked up in SGML and converted to HTML on the fly. SGML is full-text searchable. Bitmapped images of the original are also provided.

Gregory Crane: The Perseus Project

A very complex and multi-faceted site about Ancient Greece: texts and text tools, translations, lexica, maps, images of architecture and art. Gregory's site supplies a lot of information about the context of Greek culture and how it influenced what was written and vice versa.

New York Public Library Digital Library Collections Home ~ African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century

The home page provides access to the digitzed texts in the Schomburg Collection, as well as exhibitions of primary resources at NYPL, and finding aids for some of NYPL's special collections. The Women Writers texts are searchable. Texts are transcribed; no page images available.

The Letters of Ezra Cornell from the Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell.

The Blake Archive.

LION: Literature Online (Princeton Only). Contains searchable texts for "250,000 works of English and American Literature."

Princeton Papyrus Collection

Descriptions of the papyri with a few bitmapped images.

Texts from and about the American Civil War.


Sites for analyzing and comparing primary texts:

Melissa Bernstein: The Sermon of the Wolf to the English

Example of a teaching site that brings together five variant texts of a short work along with a glossary and other supporting materials. This site gives students the tools to compare variations they find among the texts, enabling them to begin exploring the reasons behind textual differences.


John Marshall: The Five Gospels Parallels

A simpler site that allows side-by-side comparison of five books of the Bible.


Poetry Texts and Readings

Poetry Resources from the CUL Literature Web site.


Medieval Documents

Internet Medieval Sourcebook


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Finding Other Primary Sources on the Web

Suggestions:
Use Web search engines with terms such as letters, i.e., Thomas Jefferson and letters.

Example at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/images/modeng/public/Jef1787a.jpg.


Browse the Web catalogs for the arts and humanities at http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/disciplines.html.

Olin*Kroch*Uris Reference

Revised June 5, 1998
Michael Engle, moe1@cornell.edu
URL: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/cet/eprimary.html


Olin and Uris Libraries, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853
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Information and reference: 607-255-4144, okuref@cornell.edu
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