Southeast Asia Visions: digital collection, using DLXS software created by Univ. of Michigan. DLXS is also used by Hearth and the May Anti-Slavery Collection.

Direct URL to Southeast Asia Visions:: http://seasiavisions.library.cornell.edu

Collection consists of historical travel narratives of SE Asia from about 1623-1928. 90% English language material . Twenty titles are French language (journal articles from La Tour de Monde).

All titles are also listed in the Library Catalog. Example: "A dog's life in Burma", told by the dog.

Features detailed access to the images in the travelogues. Over 12,000 images with metadata for

Note: A number of the images will also be added to ArtStor (maps, plates, color images). Bibliographic information (with reference to Southeast Asia Visions) will be attached.

ORIENTATION TO THE SITE

The About the Collection page provides the historical context, the geographic context, and the significance of the accounts included in the collection.

The Bibliography is a bibliography of the titles in the collection. It is not a list of further readings on the topic. The titles can be sorted by author or by country.

SEARCH FEATURES

Browse by:

Author
Title
      Note: Multi-vols are listed individually.
Date
Image Date
Image Ethnic Information
Image Format :
    Note: "Format" may not always be clear-cut. Student assistants assigned metadata, generally using clues from the text.
Image Geographic Information
Image Keyword

Basic Search: Finds one word, or one phrase. Does not include boolean capabilities however there is a Boolean search option (see link on search page).

Boolean Search:

Note: Drop-down menu options:

Proximity (word within number of words) search may be one of the most useful.

Truncation symbol = * (asterisk)

Note: You can't combine boolean and proximity searches

Help: Help info is tailored to this particular collection so it is actually quite useful. See: Help/Image Searching.
The Help page on image searching provides useful phrases (the metadata phrases) for image searching and directs users to enter these phrases in the Find search window of a Basic Search.

Note: Country name changes or name variants may have a large effect on search results. "Image Geographic Information: Burma" retrieves 4 results. "Image Geographic Information: Myanmar" retrieves 62.

Viewing images:

Viewing by image "text" provides the descriptive metadata -- what the DLSX software is searching.

Limitations of keyword text searches:

DLSX is searching the OCR (optical character recognition) scanning of the page, not the page image, so results depend on on the quality of the OCR.

Below are examples of the page image followed by the OCR'd text for Cochin-China:

 

PRINTING:

No pdfs. Printing by html page only.

COPYRIGHT QUESTIONS:

Users asking whether they can use images from the site. See: About this Project. The email (link on page) is to Fiona Patrick.

Problems/Concerns/Comments from users:

Beth Katzoff receives the online "Evaluate this Site" evaluations.

Jeff Peterson receives the "Contact Us" form and Xian Wu is generally in charge of technical issues concerned with the performance of the site. If the site is actually down, report the problem to Library Systems (George Kozak), or send a note to libit-l (folks in Library Systems monitor this list).

See the About the Project page for information on copyright, digitization process, delivery and access (basically, a description of the DLXS software).