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Vagaries of a licensed resource
- To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
- Subject: Vagaries of a licensed resource
- From: "James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:43:37 EDT
- Reply-to: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
- Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Patrologia Latina, the 19th century collection of Latin writings of the church fathers, has been an available Internet resource from Chadwyck-Healey (originally), and now ProQuest since the 1990s. The digital version was created by double-keying offshore with proofreading. It was controversially expensive, but is held and used in major research libraries. The corresponding set of Greek church fathers, Patrologia Graeca, was not done commercially, but has been done by Religion and Technology Center Inc., a US firm, at a lower level of sophistication (digital page images mainly), and is also licensed by various institutions at a price; they propose an xml version in future. The texts in PL and PG overlap but are far from duplicated by other general interest Latin and Greek "corpus" projects, so the specific projects retain value. What now to make of www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu, which presents all of PL and PG at no cost to the end-user? The website also includes other large collections of texts in Greek and Latin from the history of Christianity, also free, all presented in PDF files, but not as page images: some digital text underlies that PDF and the layout is plain but crisp and contemporary. The description on the site of how the texts were prepared is unsatisfactorily vague ("This digitalized edition has been obtained from the source using a proprietary special-purpose program."). That site comes from a group that wants to make the teachings of the official Catholic church widely known and available, but they seem to have no official link to Rome or any traditional church body (order, university, etc.). I have worked the site superficially this weekend and it seems to lack some useful features of the "old" PL in particular, but on the other hand a price of zero makes it an advantage to many. The intellectually interesting question is this: what does one have to do to be sure enough of the validity and reliability and preservability of this kind of "volunteer" resource in order to be able to give up paying for a version of the same thing that comes from an organization with a more robust infrastructure and whose lifespan and commitment to preservation can be more reliably predicted? I suspect there is nowhere near one right answer to this question. Jim O'Donnell Georgetown U.
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