Students Gain Competitive Edge at E-Text

Libra, Vol. 6 No. 4 (September, 1999).

SINCE THE BEGINNING OF 1999, the Electronic Text (E-Text) Center endowment has grown thanks to gifts from Lloyd T. Smith, Jr., G. Scott Shackelford, Roderick Ver\352 Nicoll, and the Kathryn and W. Harry Schwarzschild Fund. A goal of the University Library in the current Campaign is to establish a $1 million endowment for each of the Library's Digital Centers. These endowments provide for equipment and software upgrades and graduate fellowships supporting center research and instruction. The E-Text endowment has now reached nearly $65,000.

Support from the endowment provides graduate students who work in the E-Text Center the opportunity to gain valuable experience outside of the classroom, leading to enhanced career opportunities. As the new SGML Database Manager for Grolier's Encyclopedia, Tom Lukas (A&S '97) says, "I have learned from the world of job hunting that there are a lot of technically trained people out there, but there are precious few who can combine a knowledge of SGML encoding, document structure, and literary skills that are in such high demand in the academic, legal, and medical publishing fields. My E-Text credentials made it possible for me to pick and choose among several jobs in electronic publishing."

Catherine Tousignant (A&S '92, '95), who was the Associate Coordinator of the Center while working on her doctorate in English at U.Va., feels that "the hands-on experience that I garnered in my years at the E-Text Center was unique in its comprehensiveness. My direct experience in all aspects of producing web-based digital library collections made me an exceptionally strong candidate for my current position as a Digital Conversion Specialist at the National Digital Library of the Library of Congress. Because the E-Text Center is well known and respected throughout the Digital Library world for its high-quality and longstanding work, it was understood that I was well prepared and properly trained for such a position."

Networked electronic texts and books have become a mainstream part of teaching and research resources, and the University Library's Electronic Text Center is at the forefront of this endeavor world-wide. Oxford University's Karen Wikander, another E-Text alumna, says, "The Center is internationally known for its creation of a successful, reliable text library and archive, and is looked at not only for its history of accomplishments, but as an institution that sets the standards for online collections. Saying that I worked with Center Director David Seaman is like saying I worked with Steven Spielberg -- he's someone that everyone in this field knows and wants to work with."

Those who have supported the E-Text Center by building its endowment and providing stipends for graduate students working in the center are helping forge the future of all research libraries in the digital information age.

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Chris Larson, Library Development Office
(cpl@virginia.edu)