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... levels of headings.] ---------------------- This issue of OFFLINE presents three different types of material contributed by four guest authors covering rather different aspects of computer assisted research in our rapidly expanding electronic world. The main article by James Marchand describes new computerized ways of dealing with visual materials, and in one way or another will be relevant to every reader. Jim Marchand is the coordinator of the MEDTEXTL (Medieval Text List) and GERLINGL (Germanic Linguistics List) electronic discussion seminars (both at UIUCVMD.bitnet), and draws on his experience working with Gothic palimpsest manuscripts, among other things. My colleague James O'Donnell, editor of the electronic and hardcopy Bryn Mawr Classical Review and no stranger to OFFLINE readers, then reviews the new Christian Latin CD-ROM from CETEDOC and Brepols in Belgium. Finally, Michael Strangelove (who also coordinates some electronic discussion groups including CONTEXT-L, for cultural analysis of ancient texts) and Alan Groves report more briefly on some new products and opportunities of both a general informational sort (Directories and Publication Listings) and of specific interest to Hebrew Bible students. And there is a PS from yours truly. Enjoy! (Or at least, be informed.) ----- Feature Article: The Computer as Camera and Darkroom, by James Marchand, Center for Advanced Study Professor of German, Linguistics and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana Those who deal in earlier cultures have to depend on representations of some kind of the artifacts left behind by those cultures: sketches, lithographs, xylographs, models, etc. Since the advent of photography in the mid-19th Century, we have come more and more to depend upon photography as our means of recording and preserving the past. The problem with photographs is that they are often poorly done, particularly given the conditions under which they often must be made, and the process of improving them in the darkroom is long and arduous. The digital computer has changed all that. Note that I have said "the digital computer." A normal photograph is not digital, but analog in nature, that is to say, is continuous rather than discrete in its registration of light values. The notion of digitizing photographs comes from America's space program, particularly LANDSAT; early Russian and American photographs from space were poor in quality and were analog, so that very little could be done to improve, "enhance" them. Dr. Robert Nathan came up with an idea and some programs which permitted digitizing the photographs from Ranger 7, 8 and 9, and the science of digitizing images, the mainstay of image processing, was born. In fact, one of the best introductions to the field of image processing is still Johannes G. Moik, Digital Processing of Remotely Sensed Images (NASA SP-431) (Superintendent of Documents, 1980). What does it mean, to digitize? Everyone knows that the computer we normally use is called a digital computer because all its information is broken down into yes/no particles called bits (originally "binary digits"). In order to put any information into a computer, the information must be digitized (broken down into yes/no configurrations). That is why, for example, we have the ASCII system which gives us so much trouble. Early on, the best we could do in a printer is to have two to the seventh (128), since we had at best eight bit "chips," leaving us with seven patterns of yes/no questions to handle all the letters of the alphabet and other symbols. Of course, Hollerith punched cards, which also had only 128 patterns, brought all this about in part. If we look at a photograph or a scene (we will restrict ourselves to black and white for simplicity at the moment), what we see is continuous values of gray, from black to white. A computer screen or a television screen, however, has to render this scene as configurations of dots, so that the computer screen is like a pointilliste painting or a Sunday comics. If you hold the Sunday comics under a strong magnifying glass, you can see that the picture is actually composed of little dots; if you look closely at a TV screen, you will see the same thing. The computer, through a control card, assigns to each of these dots a unique position (x,y) through a raster scheme familiar to us from juke boxes, seat numbers, etc., a column/row address. It also assigns a gray scale value, according to how much light is transmitted. Thus, the LUT (look up table) generated by a scene in the computer assigns to each pixel (picture element) on the screen a value f(x,y), where x and y are the familiar spatial coordinates and f is the radiometric value in terms of gray- scale. This means that one can manipulate the pixels of an image on the screen one-by-one, a group at a time, a screen (frame) at a time, and that one can also do radiometric operations. Colorizing old films is an example of one process, which assigns color values to gray values.

Image acquisition. There are several ways to get an image into the computer. An old picture, if it has not already been "digitized" by being printed through a half-tone screen (remember the Sunday comics), can be scanned in, using a device such as the Hewlett Packard ScanJet Plus. Here, the size of the chip on the board which connects the scanner to the computer is crucial. At present, we will assume an eight-bit channel, and I would caution that a smaller channel is not practicable in today's world; if you have an old scanner, such as the Hewlett Packard ScanJet, with a four-bit bus, you can modify this easily. This yields 256 levels (2 to the eighth = 256) of gray, enough until one comes to color, where a 32 bit chip is often used. The scanner generates a look up table (LUT), assigning to each dot (whence the measure DPI, dots per inch, typically 300) or pixel a geometric location (x,y) and a gray level (f). If one thinks of a "normal" watch with hands as analog and a "digital" watch as digital, then the process becomes clear. The larger the chip (number of levels), the less information is lost. With 256 levels of gray, my eye does not detect any loss. In a short column like this, I cannot go into other aspects of loss and gain, such as resolution, etc., much of which will depend on your display equipment. Of course, one does not have to scan in a print. The technology is there to work with films, such as microfilm, but at present this is mostly in the development stage. If one wishes to input directly from film, the best thing at present is to convert the film to slides and to use a slide reader, such as the Nikon FL-3510AF, a rather expensive way to go, but one which does eliminate one source of potential error. Another way of acquiring an image is by direct photography by means of a digitizing camera. All of us are familiar with one such camera, namely the video camera. Since the television screen consists of pixels, the video camera must digitize the scene it is registering. It is for this reason that some of the earliest attempts at using the computer to enhance manuscripts used the video camera. In so doing, however, it is important to use a so-called "frame grabber" to freeze and record one frame. In reality, the video camera is of very little use for our purposes, though it can be relatively cheap. When one adds the fact that raster systems (LUTs) differ in time and in space (try running a European video on your VCR), video becomes a very poor substitute for a camera. If you want to try this out: In the April 1990 issue of his PsL News, Nelson Ford discussed a video card, the VIP-640. He found that he could get a better image by using a Sony black and white and the VIP-640 than he could with a scanner and Gray F/X. His group, the Houston Area League, absolutely the best when it comes to shareware, offers a bundled package for about $500, including a Sony black and white camera, a board, plus PicturePublisher. There are more expensive commercial ventures also; the simplest way of learning about them is through the journal Resolution, which is available free from its publisher (P. O. Box 1347, Camden, Maine 04843). We are seeing the advent of new digitizing cameras, such as the Canon Color Xapshot. With this "camera" you can take pictures in color, do macrophotographs, use filters, record up to 50 pictures on one disk, etc. The problem is that you have to buy an interface card to make it work for your computer, since the little disk is incompatible with anything else. I have used this for runestones, and it does an excellent job. Another recent arrival is the Dycam, a digital still camera which does not have a disk and does not require a board. It stores its photos in its own RAM and can store 32 256 gray-scale images with 376 by 240 resolution, according to InfoWorld 13.32 (August 12, 1991), p. 54. It then feeds them into your computer through the serial port. Neither of these cameras is suitable for finicking work, but they are a start. More expensive and better devices, such as the new Sony SEPS-1000 (see Resolution, Jan/Feb, 1992, p. 7), which will permit better "scientific" photography are coming on the market. The value of having a camera attached to a computer is enormous. As the size of computers comes down, one can envisage carrying five pounds of equipment and being able to do such things as to filter in real time. Normally if one, say, has the idea that a light blue filter (in the case of ferrous based inks which occasionally have an orangish cast) might work, one has to take a photograph, go to the darkroom, develop it, perhaps even to print it, before finding out that it did or did not work. With a digitizing camera attached to a computer with a monitor, one can see the results immediately. When more and more such cameras are made available, filtration will be easier, we will have wrap- around ultraviolets, etc. With the advent of new graphic formats and reduction techniques, storage will cease to be a problem. It should also be pointed out that the first problem in image acquisition is access, which is often the most difficult part of the whole process. Not many keepers of archives are going to be willing to have a scholar with a back-load of equipment photograph in their archive. Given also the problem one has with local current, etc., it is extremely important, if one wants to do ones own work, and that is the only good way to go, to be self-contained and light.

Image Manipulation -- The Computer as Darkroom Once one has acquired the image, one can (both fortunately and unfortunately) manipulate it in various ways. Remembering our formula for the pixel, f(x,y), one could, for example, write a simple BASIC routine, "let f(x,y) = f+40(x,y)" and brighten a photograph by 40 units. One could falsify a document just as easily, however, and scholarship is going to have to address this problem. You can take a photograph of a friend and put two noses on him/her. Two excellent books illustrating such techniques are: Composites: Computer Generated Portraits, by Nancy Burson, Richard Carling and David Kramlich (NY: Beech Tree Books, 1986; ISBN 0-688-02601-X) and Gerard J. Holzmann, Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988; ISBN 0-13-074410-7). Software illustrations of the latter (in C) are also available. For this reason, it is important that the scholar use only algorithms; otherwise his work is just as subjective as that of the lithographer or the xylographer. If the intention is to make a legible facsimile, and if the scholar clearly announces his intent and the fact that he is using geometric methods, I see nothing wrong with such manipulation. I will just mention some of the algorithms which may be used. For a thorough discussion, you cannot get better than Rafael C. Gonzalez and Paul Wintz, Digital Image Processing (Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN 0-201-02596-5). It is somewhat out-of-date (though there is a second edition, which I don't have at hand), but I haven't seen anything better. If you want to see what histogram equalization can accomplish, look at the picture of the dollar on p. 126.

Geometric operations Most of these are best ignored, but it is good, for example, to mask off a portion of a picture to work on. For the most part, operations should not be carried on on an entire frame (picture), since you probably will not want to increase the contrast, for example, over the entire picture. This operation of masking, which can be difficult in photography, is easy with the computer. Note also that masking is not dangerous, since most programs will allow one to return to the original position seamlessly. The same can be said for using various overlays, which can at times be useful. It is quite difficult to do overlays without slippage with normal photography; in the computer it offers no problem. It can occasionally be of interest to use geometric operations to correct deformities in the original or the registration of it, as in the case of very crinkly parchment or tightly rolled scrolls.

Cutting and pasting. These two geometric operations can be of great value. In the work of "lacunology," for example, letters from one part of a manuscript are used to "repair" letters from another part. In my own case, I have cut out Gothic letters and assigned them to keys, using SLEd (from VS Software), so that I then had a typewriter which typed Gothic characters as they were found in our manuscripts, both on the screen and in the printer.

Enlargement and reduction. Other geometric operations include enlargement or reduction. The latter operation, often overlooked, is good for old macro photos, since stepping them down increases the resolution. Here the results also can be at times spectacular.

Radiometric operations These are the ones of most interest to us who work with difficult to register scripts and artifacts. We have already mentioned brightening, an obvious darkroom operation and one which is simple for the computer.

Contrast stretching. Those who remember the stir caused by William Bennett's use of high contrast in his study of the Skeireins (e.g. "The Vatican Leaves of the Skeireins in High-Contrast Reproduction," PMLA LXIX [1954] 655-676) will understand the (often wrong) desire of the scholar to add contrast to a picture. In the case of computer images, this is no problem; one simply asks that, e.g., all values from 1-50 become 1 (are replaced in the lookup table by 1), whereas all other values become zero. The results can be spectacular. NB: in real use, it is best to have a joy-stick installed and to change the values continuously until the result one is looking for is obtained. Make sure to mask!

Histogram operations. One can manipulate the histogram of the dispersal of grays in a picture. This can be done to part of the picture or to all of it. Many of the special effects seen on TV are done by histogram specification. Histogram equalization, which reduces highs and lows on the gray scale, often reveals things which cannot be seen by the naked eye on a photograph.

Edge finding. One can set up an algorithm to sense differences in the radiometric values (gray levels) in an area, connect the values where the differentiation takes place, and obtain an edge. The results can at times be of use; an example of what can be done is seen in my article, "The Use of the Computer in the Humanities," Ideal 2 (1987), p. 27. We fed into the computer pictures of Gothic letters which were quite unusable, sensed the edges, contour rounded, and filled in: The result was a Gothic alphabet remarkably like that obtained from a professional scribe (cf. Sydney Fairbanks and F. P. Magun, Jr., "On Writing and Printing Gothic," Speculum 15 [1940] 313- 330, 16 [1941] 122).

Image smoothing. By a somewhat opposite method, one can obtain smoothing of an image, analogous to the use of a soft- focus lens in photography. This can be quite useful in processing photographs of three-dimensional objects where edges are too sharp and interfere with perception.

Pseudo-color. Since one can address each pixel and also each level of gray, it is possible to tell all values from 50 to 70, for example, to turn green. At times, this, too, can be very useful, mainly for decipherment of the photograph, not for publication. Such software as Paintbrush IV Plus from Z-Soft can be used for this purpose.

Density slicing. A kind of pseudo-color operation is density slicing, in which one selects a "slice" of values, say 30-50, and has them turn black, whereas all others are assigned white. In the case of a gray-rich photo of, say, a palimpsest, the results again can be excellent. This represents a new event in photography, one which cannot be duplicated in the darkroom.

Deblurring. It has recently been announced that investigators at Rochester have succeeded in developing an algorithm for enhancing out-of-focus images. As any photographer who has worked in macro-photography can tell you, this is an all- too-common event. See "Taking the Fuzz out of Photos," Newsweek (Jan. 8, 1990, p. 61). Many of these operations have been programmed and are available in off-the-shelf software. Two which I recommend to those who use the DOS platform are PicturePublisher from Micrografx (works under Windows; often bundled with other programs) and Gray f/x (from Xerox). I have already mentioned Paintbrush (from Z- Soft) as a very useful tool. It should be pointed out that such work is not easy; it is tedious in the extreme, and requires hard and careful work. If you want to do careful work, e.g. density slicing, you need to do your own programming, which is nothing like as hard as its seems at first. Mit Sturm ist da nichts einzunehmen ["Nothing comes easy!" Goethe]. It should also be pointed out that we are just beginning. I have not written about 3-dimensional imaging, about color, about holography, about the possibility of 3-dimensional printing, all of which are upon us. More people are becoming involved. The space effort and the raising of the Titanic are highly visible uses of image processing and remote (non-invasive) sensing. One already sees image enhancement studios on a commercial basis arising all over America. Such establishments refurbish old photos (despeckling, contour rounding, pseudo-color, etc.) much in the manner in which retouchers used to work. This means cheaper and better software and hardware. At the same time, storage capacity is going up day-by-day. Kodak has announced a new "darkroom," called Photo-CD, which consists of hardware and software to handle slides which are simply dropped into the scanner. The result can be enhanced by their software, then stored on CD-ROM. This means for us, for example, that the entire oeuvre of the Swedish painter, Albertus Pictor, almost totally unknown outside Sweden, can be made available on 3 CD-ROMs, with captions and discussion, and can then be displayed using random access techniques. The possibilities for recording and display of early manuscripts are enormous. The next generation of scholars will have to become not only computer literate, but also image literate. [Prof. Marchand can be reached electronically as MARCHAND@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU, or by regular mail at 3072 FLB, 707 S. Mathews, University of Illinois, Urbana IL 61801.] ----- Review: CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts (CLCLT), reviewed by James J. O'Donnell, Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania The first edition of the CETEDOC CD-ROM database of patristic and medieval Latin texts ("CLCLT" in the promotional literature) was released on schedule in late December, 1991. The disk was prepared by the Belgian CETEDOC project at the University of Louvain and is distributed by the publishing firm of Brepols. The first version contains 21 million words of text, mainly duplicating the contents of the Corpus Christianorum series (both patristic and medieval sections), but with additional texts as well from other sources chosen to bring certain central authors up to completion: so Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great are here in toto, even where this means using older editions of some works. The disk comes with its own software. Installation on my DOS-based 386 (33 MHz) machine took approximately one minute (but note that I already had the CD-ROM drive installed and operating for other purposes -- if you need to start from scratch it will take a little longer), and the first successful word search took approximately one additional minute. The disk can also be run with a Macintosh. The manual is concise and helpful, and particularly helpful in offering strategies for searching the varying orthographies of later Latin texts. The strengths of the disk are its coverage of patristic texts (its medieval coverage reflects the spottiness and distribution of Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis editions) and the friendliness of the software. That first word search, for a word that occurs 16 times in the whole database, took approximately six seconds. A test search for "pagan*" (where the "*" wildcard extender covers any number of characters, and thus embraces lemmata from pagana to paganitas) now takes four seconds. The secret, as with all high-speed CD searching, is in the indexing that has been done on the disk already. The fastest searches are those that cover the whole disk; to restrict the search area to an author or group of authors both requires a little fiddling beforehand (and restricting to a heavily- represented author can take as much as a minute, while the software makes up its mind which texts to search for you), and then the search itself takes a little longer; but try as I might to befuddle the system, I have not succeeded in making any search take longer than two minutes from conception to completion. Output may be stored to disk or printed. Output comes in the form of screen after screen of "sententiae," the disk's shorthand for the units of composition it uses for reckoning. Roughly equivalent to English "sentences," these units generally provide a generous sampling of context based on syntax and meaning, not an arbitrary number of lines before and after. Further, if you place the cursor on any search-result passage and hit the CR (return/send key), you are automatically given the full context, that is, the original text with the cursor on the passage you have been directed to: you may then scroll up and down as you please through the whole work from which that passage comes. This is a *very* friendly feature of the program. The software leaves some things to be desired. (1) It is set up to discourage downloading of texts. Now in fact one can circumvent the software and capture screen after screen of text with some screen-dump utility, then format for oneself, but the program's license agreement forbids this. It is not clear to me what abuse the disk's producers fear, and in the long run downloadable texts will be far more attractive than those with any form of "copy protection," as software producers learned some years ago. (2) When you get a huge selection of "hits" with a search, the only ways to approach this data are either to scroll down one "sententia" at a time (you always know how many hits you have achieved, so you can estimate how time consuming this will be), or go to the bottom of the file of results or to the top. There is no way to jump to the middle, though a handy Mac-like register on the right side of the screen positively cries out to be manipulated by a mouse. I find this top/bottom limitation especially inconvenient owing to my interest in Augustine: for the average global search with many "hits," Augustine comes somewhere in the middle of the pile, and I am already weary of scrolling through Tertullian and Cyprian to get to him. One way around this, of course, is to "print" the results of the search to disk, then open the disk file with a word processor and search there. (For what it's worth I found this very easy to do with Desqview in DOS: it was a matter of seconds to configure the CETEDOC program to run under Desqview, so I can keep the CETEDOC program running, hop over to a word processor and check files, then hop back. I also keep the Latin Vulgate text (thanks to CCAT)on my regular hard disk, so I have the capacity to search the Vulgate with one hand, the fathers with the other, and run a third word processing window at the same time for the results. Hog heaven for the likes of me, to be sure. I have not yet tried resizing my Desqview windows to have the material all visible on screen at once, but in principle that is possible as well. (3) The most annoying small problem with the software is that it is not possible to search for a specific reference: so if I have a footnote to Aug. civ. dei 18.43, I cannot simply dip into the disk and see that passage. I *think* I would have to have some clue as to the subject or wording of that passage before I could find it quickly on the disk. I regard these drawbacks as minor ones to be worked out in later releases and am quite happy with the disk. Pricing is high by the standards of TLG or PHI, but within reach. The list price to an institution (or its library) depends on what other Brepols subscriptions the institution has paid for; a typical list price is on the order of $3,000. Once an institution purchases a single copy, moreover, it or any member of the institution may purchase a further copy for half the subscription price. This means in practice that if a scholar's institution can be persuaded to acquire a copy (for the library, e.g.), the individual scholar can then acquire another at half price; and $1500 is at least within reach, by comparison to the current TLG subscription rates. The CETEDOC disk is purchased outright, and updates are promised every two years or so. This is not the only project of its sort. The British publishing firm of Chadwyck-Healey has announced a project to publish a multi-CD edition comprising all the contents of Migne's Patrologia Latina, entered by double-keyboarding and tagged in accord with TEI/SGML standards to help distinguish, say, ancient texts from modern annotation. The projectt makes no attempt to replace PL texts with better modern editions, where they exist, and so will inevitably give new life to the philological methods and achievements of the seventeenth and eithteenth centuries, from which much of the PL anthology was drawn. Whether this project is well-founded has been the subject of lively debate on e-mail lists like MEDTEXTL (Medieval Text List), ANSAX-L (Anglo- Saxon Studies), and HUMANIST. The pricing may make discussion moot for many: subscription price to purchase the materials for those who hurry (and pay their money well in advance of seeing a first disk) is $45,000, ascending by stages to $60,000 on publication of the first disk (optimistically scheduled for 1993). The present writer has not been shy in expressing his criticism of this project, but recognizes that wise and eminent persons (including my own dissertation adviser and a colleague with whom I am team-teaching a patristic seminar this term) have been more generous in assessing its merits and potential. At any rate, a new age has now begun. The CETEDOC disk's 21 million words approximately triple the total body of computer- accessible Latin text in existence (the PHI disk with virtually all of classical literature on it seems to contain not much more than 10 or 11 million words; in the patristic area, Augustine alone runs to 5 million words). The speed and versatility of the software and the ease of use will make it an indispensable tool in short order. ----- Announcements: Morphologically Analyzed Hebrew Bible Materials and Accessing Software, contributed by Alan Groves, Biblical Studies/Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary Westminster Morphology, an electronic, morphologically tagged text of the Hebrew Bible (BHS) has recently been released by Westminster Seminary. It is in raw ASCII and requires 14MB of hard disk space. The text includes locators (chapter & verse), transliterated BHS text, transliterated dictionary lemma, and analysis. Ketiv/Qere are noted as are certain problems with the text of BHS. The cost is $90 (including shipping and handling) from: Prof. Alan Groves Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, PA 19118 phone: 215 887-5511 email: groves@penndrls.upenn.edu Accessing Software: Obtaining appropriate search and retrieval software for use with this material is a separate issue. At present only LBase (obtainable from Westminster, other secondary sources, or directly from Silver Mountain Software) is available for sophisticated use of this data. LBase works on IBM/DOS machines, with the straight ASCII text or with a specially encoded version prepared by Silver Mountain Software. Other software is forthcoming for both Mac and IBM/DOS. In a related development, the Electronic Concordance Application (ECA) morphologically and syntactically encoded Hebrew database from the Free University (Amsterdam), a sister to the Westminster morphology, is being bundled with QUEST, a sophisticated morpho- syntactical search engine, to provide electronic access to the morphology and syntax of BHS on IBM 286/386/486 type machines. Demonstrated at SBL in Kansas City, this program and database require 8MB of harddisk space, 1MB of RAM (2MB for best performance), and a VGA or EGA or Hercules graphics adaptor. Because the data is pre-indexed and compressed, and thus 'fixed,' it cannot be changed by the scholar but it can be imported into other environments for reformatting and printing. The package including QUEST and the ECA-Database will be available on or around 1 March from Prof. Groves for $199 plus shipping and handling. For further information contact Prof. Groves. ----- Announcements: Directory of Electronic Materials and an Electronic Relgious Studies Publications Listing (CONTENTS), contributed by Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa A new model of collaborative, not-for-profit scholarly publishing has developed over the past year that combines networked electronic text with the availability of a low cost printed text. This model is seen in the Association of Research Libraries' Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing's first edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, by Michael Strangelove and Diane Kovacs, edited by Ann Okerson (ISSN: 1057-1337, 1991). The ARL approached the authors a year ago and offered to publish in one printed volume the electronic Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters prepared by Michael Strangelove and the Directory of Academic Discussion Lists and Interest Groups by Diane Kovacs. The first directory documents twenty seven electonic journals and eighty three electronic newsletters that are distributed via the academic networks. The second directory documents five hundred seventeen online academic conferences that function like ongoing conferences on all subjects, to which all are invited to freely participate. These two new communication mediums represent the beginning of a revoltion in the nature of scholarly communication. Under the ARL agreement, the authors would retain copyright to the electronic text while the ARL received limited rights to be the sole distributer of the printed version of this edition. Unlike many contracts, this copyright did not extend beyond the first edition. The first run of one thousand copies quickly sold out even before reviews where available. A second revised edition of two thousand copies will be available shortly. This collaborative effort demonstrates that there is no necessary conflict between freely available networked versions of a text and hardcopy publication, even at the low price of the ARL Directory. The result is a democratizing of access to the authors' work that ensures that both electronic and print based users have full access to the text. No one is denied access to the material due to a simple lack of money and authors do not lose control of their intellectual productions. This sort of model for not-for-profit publication deserves serious consideration from university and academic associations if networked publication is to be integrated into existing peer review and academic advancement structures. The Net has the potential to bring an end to the currently common transfer to publishers of authorial ownership of intellectual production and to replace print based publication as the primary means of the dissemination and legitimation of academic production. Yet this potential will not be realized unless innovative and collaborative models are aggressively and proactively established in the course of this decade. The next phase of the ARL Directory will continue to expand the use of the Net as a publication medium by creating a fully searchable TELNET accessible database as a third means of access. Contrary to the position maintained by traditional for-profit publishers, the ARL is committed to expanded Internet access of the text to the point where there is no longer a demand for maintaining anything other than a networked source. This phase will also see a freely available hypertext version created. The potential uses of the academic networks extend far beyond the new forums of electronic serials and academic conferences. One new model of networked information dissemination is being attempted in the Religious Studies Publications List called CONTENTS. This Listserv list is designed to replicate serials such as the Religious Studies Review by making information available to the online academic community regarding new publications of relevance to religious studies. CONTENTS@UOTTAWA (or @ACADVM1.UOTTAWA.CA) departs from the print based publication review vehicles in several significant ways: (1) first of all, there is no subscription fee; (2) there is no limitation on the number or size of reviews and notes on recent publications; (3) the contents of journal issues will be posted and reviewed and the table of contents of all publications documented will also be posted to list members; and, (4) there will be minimal time lag between the release of a publication and the availability of reviews and indications of the contents of new publications. This new forum anticipates the near future when many publishers will offer delivery of individual book chapters and journal articles to the research community. In its first few weeks of operation, CONTENTS already has over one hundred sixty members and four cooperating academic publishers -- Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Sheffield Academic Press, the Catholic University of America Press and the University of Scranton Press. Publishers will be encouraged to provide an online document ordering service to list members. Along with journals and books in religious studies, CONTENTS will also post information on thesis, dissertations, pre-publication papers, networked bibliographies and related documents of interest to the academic community. All records will be archived and searchable via LISTSERV and the database will eventually be mounted on a public access computer system as a fully searchable TELNET accessable database. For more information on how to access the networked version of the ARL Directory project or for information on how to participate in the Religious Studies Publication List, contact the CONTENTS project Director: Michael Strangelove Department of Religious Studies University of Ottawa BITNET: 441495@Uottawa Internet: 441495@Acadvm1.Uottawa.CA Postal Mail: 177 Waller, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 CANADA Voice: (613) 237-2052 FAX: (613) 564-6641 Afterword: The Computers and Texts Newsletter Another valuable source of information that for the present remains free for the asking is the Newsletter Computers and Texts produced by the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) Centre for Textual Studies/Office for Humanities Communication (OHC) at the Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN England (CTITEXT@VAX.OX.AC.UK). With the departure of former director Susan Hockey to take up the leadership of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) sponsored by Princeton and Rutgers Universities, the CTI/OHC is being directed by Dr. Marilyn Deegan. The Fall 1991 issue of the Newsletter focuses on the acquisition, encoding and analysis of texts; the Spring 1992 issue will deal with applications of computers to philosophy. Sometimes it is still true that the good things in life are free. Don't miss this one. <-----> Please send information, suggestions or queries concerning OFFLINE to Robert A. Kraft, Box 36 College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104-6303. Telephone (215) 898- 5827. Internet address: KRAFT@PENNDRLS.UPENN.EDU (please note that the previous BITNET address is no longer operational). To request printed information or materials from OFFLINE, please supply an appropriately sized, self-addressed envelope or an address label. A complete electronic file of OFFLINE columns is available upon request (for IBM/DOS, Mac, or IBYCUS), or from the HUMANIST discussion group FileServer (BROWNVM.BITNET). //end #37//