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At 4:23 PM 8/16/96, Peter Verheyen wrote:

[snip]

>
>In order to be able to convert the finding aids on the fly, so to speak, we
>would need to get Dynaweb, which I found out costs $22,000+ (anyone know of
>a cheaper yet comparable product).

Under the EBT University Grant program, Dynaweb is free.  Look at the
description at <http://www.ebt.com/docs/grant.html>.  If you have access to
PAT, the search engine from Open Text (if you have the OED online, your
campus may already be using this software) you can convert SGML to HTML on
the fly.  Look at the Humanities Text Initiative at the University of
Michigan <http://www.hti.umich.edu> to see what this method can do.

>
>The costs for the SGML editor we were made aware of, but raised the eyebrows
>of our administrators.

We use Author/Editor whose academic price is between five and six hundred
dollars.  I understand that there is an SGML Edition of WordPerfect for
Windows and that this costs about $130.  If there are any emacs devotees in
your shop, using emacs with the psgml plug-in is very low cost indeed.

>Could any one give me any idea of what other hidden
>costs (outside of staff training) might still be out there; advise us of
>anything else we should be aware of, good or bad; generally advise us.
>
Staff training is not a small item at all.  In order to understand the
benefits of EAD, you should really have a solid understanding of the
benefits of SGML.  Take a look at Robin Cover's incomparable SGML Web Page
<http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgml.html>.

You may want a few other tools also.  We use Near & Far from Microstar.  I
forget what it cost but it wasn't a lot.  You should definitely get a copy
of Panorama Pro from SoftQuad.  This will allow you to develop stylesheets
to serve your SGML text directly to the Web.

>In essence, what is the value to our institution to do all this, when we can
>just as easily make our finding aids available as preformatted html text. In
>either case they are about equally as searchable without the added expense
>of a search engine which works across files/directories.
>

If you put information up in EAD SGML you will have the advantage that your
information will be in a truly archival format.  This means that the format
is controlled by the information, not by some application.  When new
aplications come along, as they will, your SGML will be transportable,
where HTML (which is largely presentation oriented) will most probably not
be.  With SGML, even if it takes a little effort, you only have to encode
your data once.



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