Centre projects
Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Program at UNB
The University of New Brunswick is investigating the facets and feasibility
of implementing an electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) program.
Participating departments are: The Electronic Text Centre at UNB Libraries,
Integrated Technology Services (ITS), the
UNB Graduate Student Association, and the
School of Graduate Studies. The UNB
ETD initiative is in a prototype stage; information on the project will be
posted here as it develops. The UNB project is part of the broader ETD network,
the Networked Digital Library of
Theses and Dissertations.
ETD Program
Website
Digital Imaging Centre
The Digital Imaging Centre fulfills part of the Electronic Text Centre's mandate to lend technical and
educational support to University of New Brunswick faculty, students, and to other institutions for their electronic publishing activities. As such the Centre provides scalable technologies and services for creating and managing digital image collections. The Centre also hosts a variety of collections, ranging from historical documents and cultural artifacts to architectural renderings and topographical maps.
Metadata and
Verity Search at UNB
The Electronic Text Centre, in collaboration with the UNB Web Development Team, have designed and implemented a metadata-driven Web management system for indexing and managing UNB Web content.
View documentation and
workscreens
Electronic Text Centre: Research and Development
A summary of past and present Centre research activities.
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/research.htm
UNB Web Management Prototype
At the University of New Brunswick Web Development Team's request, the Electronic Text Centre researched, designed, and built a prototype system for indexing and searching the UNB Website. The demands of serving information needs of faculty, students, and various other users of the Website motivated our development of a system to make the UNB Website more accessible and to better ensure the currency of its content.
View the report.
EBooks
The Electronic Text Centre is experimenting with current EBook software and technologies includingMicrosoft Reader, GlassBook, eRocket and OverDrive's ReaderWorks. For information on the EBook The Electronic Book Evaluation Project provides an overview of industry information and links to articles that evaluate the EBook within a library context.
An XML and HTML based specification for the EBook is currently under development at the Open eBook Forum (OEBF). With the OEB, "a publisher can format a title once according to the specification and the content will be compatible with a wide variety of reading devices. This agreement on a common set of file specifications will allow publishers to reach a large audience without separately reformatting their titles for each machine. This specification is designed to be compatible with the development plans of the major eBook efforts already underway."
To compare EBook presentation styles try downloading the readers (free) to read Alice in Wonderland:
Microsoft Reader 
Glassbook Reader 
eRocket Reader
The Alice in Wonderland file is available for free download in
MicrosoftReader, GlassBook and eRocket formats from Barnes&Noble's eBook section.
Expansion of Imaging Services
The Electronic Text Centre is building a digital image repository of diverse collections intended to serve the research and instructional needs of scholars worldwide.
View the demonstration site.
Canadian Poetry
The Electronic Text Centre and Chadwyck-Healey (Bell and Howell Information & Learning Services) have created a full-text, searchable database of Canadian poetry in English covering the late 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. A board comprised of prominent literary scholars from seven Canadian universities established the editorial policy, selecting one hundred and eighty-five poets. The collection includes a biographical profile of each poet as well as an extensive bibliography.
Metadata Searching in a Multimedia Database Environment
Industry Canada recently contracted the Electronic Text Centre to review the state of the art in Internet delivery of multimedia objects, and to make recommendations concerning suitable resource description schemes. The resultant report, Metadata Searching in a Multimedia Database Environment, includes metadata schemes that describe a variety of multimedia objects - image, sound, video and virtual reality - intended for Canadian school age children and their teachers using Industry Canada's SchoolNet Website.
View the report.
Finding Aids to Literary Papers in Canadian Archival Collections
Finding Aids to Literary Papers in Canadian Archival Collections is a collaborative prototype initiative to create, convert and publish electronic versions of finding aids of various collections with in Canadian institutions. Each finding aid is encoded with the Encoded Archival Description standard and will be searchable both within and across institutions.
Project Website
Educational initiatives
2004 Summer Seminar Series
For the past seven years, the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick
has offered a highly successful summer institute, "Creating Electronic Texts and
Images- a Practical exploration of the Research, Preservation and Pedagogical uses of
Electronic Text and Images". This year the Centre is pleased to announce an expanded
offering of two one-week workshops, "Essentials of Electronic Publishing" with David
Gants (http://www.unb.ca/research/research_chair/grants.htm), and "Intensive Introduction to Encoded Archival Description" with Daniel Pitti,
(http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~dvp4c/). There will also be a two-day workshop "Fundamentals of Digital Imaging" with Marc Bragdon.
2004 Summer
Institute Homepage
Annual Summer Institute - 2003
The University of New Brunswick's Electronic Text Centre, along with
Archives and Special Collections, will host the Summer Institute on creating Electronic Texts and Images. This year's Institute is scheduled for August 24 - 29 with David Seaman as instructor. David, noted speaker and writer on humanities computing ssues, is the founding Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia and is currently the Director of the Digital Library Federation.
2003 Summer Institute Website
Multimedia 3412: The New Publishing
Staff from the Electronic Text Centre offers a course through the Multimedia Studies Program entitled MM 3412: The New Publishing. The course was designed to impart a working knowledge of the processes and issues related to scholarly and academic electronic publishing and data structuring. Through lectures and hands-on exercises students learned about standard textual and image-based document markup and encoding practices.
Class Website
Metadata, Online Education, and the CanCore Protocol: A workshop hosted by TeleEd New Brunswick and the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick, Friday, March 23, 2001.
Emerging metadata standards and their applications are impacting heavily on e-learning and associated initiatives for managing and making Web-accessible educational content. Representatives from national online education projects discussed their work and provided context for an introduction to the newly launched "CanCore Protocol", a metadata standard for the Canadian online learning sector.
Metadata, Online Education, and the CanCore Protocol
