Technical Considerations - University of New Brunswick Electronic Text Centre
Abstracts for the Journal of Distance Education from 1986 on are available through this site. The abstracts are fully searchable in both French and English using the Centre's OpenText search engine. For the French version, search terms are entered without accents, for example représentation is entered as representation. In technical terms, this should not effect the recall but may effect the precision. In other words, an unaccented search will retrieve all the items retrieved by the accented search but may result in some additional non-relevant retrievals. This should not be significant with the small amount of data in the Journal of Distance Education database.The abstracts were received in print form. Optical character recognition (OCR) was used to
convert the print to machine readable form in a WordPerfect format. The abstracts were
then proofed and later proofed again through a sampling method. The use of OCR is not error
free and catching all mistakes can be difficult. Please report any errors to: James
Kerr.
The Centre is currently creating headers for the each of the abstracts in order to enrich and
standardize the search function and to provide archival documentation at the article level (sample
header). Once that information is created, someone searching the abstracts will be able to limit
their search to a time period, author, title, abstract or some combination. The Text Centre is
taking the lead role and working with a number of presses and Industry Canada
to create a one-stop search site for Canadian journals based on the use of such headers or
metadata.
The Text Centre is electronically publishing to standards a number of journals as well as a
variety of texts. It offers a variety of services. For example, in the near future users will be able
to click a button on a journal homepage in order to receive automatically by email the table of
contents page each time a new issue is published.
For more information on electronic publishing at the Text Centre contact Alan Burk or James Kerr
December 22, 1997
Alan Burk, Director, Electronic Text Centre