Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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As this research <strong>in</strong>dicates, lexicons and other traditional reference tools will need to be redesigned as
knowledge sources that can be used not just by scholars but also by students.
Canonical Text Services, Citation Detection, and Citation L<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g
Digital libraries of classics typically conta<strong>in</strong> both primary and secondary materials (commentaries,
dictionaries, lexicons, etc.) Many of these secondary materials, as well as journal articles <strong>in</strong> JSTOR 163
and historical books <strong>in</strong> Google Books and the Internet Archive, will conta<strong>in</strong> a fair amount of latent
semantic <strong>in</strong>formation, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g references to canonical texts (typically primary sources), historical
persons, and place names, as well as a variety of other <strong>in</strong>formation.
In order to effectively l<strong>in</strong>k to primary sources, however, these sources must not only be available
onl<strong>in</strong>e but also be structured <strong>in</strong> a uniform or at least mach<strong>in</strong>e-actionable way. One proposed solution to
this problem is the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol. 164 Developed by Neel Smith and
Christopher Blackwell, “the Canonical Text Services (CTS) are part of the CITE architecture” and the
“specification def<strong>in</strong>es a network service for identify<strong>in</strong>g texts and for retriev<strong>in</strong>g fragments of texts by
canonical reference expressed as CTS URNs.” 165 Canonical references have been def<strong>in</strong>ed as
“references to discrete corpora of ancient texts that are written by scholars <strong>in</strong> a canonical citation
format” (Romanello 2008), so, for example, “Hom. Il.” typically refers to Homer’s Iliad. One major
function of CTS, which was previously known as the Classical Text Services protocol, “is to def<strong>in</strong>e a
network service enabl<strong>in</strong>g use of a distributed collection of texts accord<strong>in</strong>g to notions that are traditional
among classicists” (Porter et al. 2006).
The CTS protocol is part of a larger CITE 166 architecture that has been designed to encompass
collections of structured objects, <strong>in</strong>dexes, texts, and extended objects. CTS is one of three services
def<strong>in</strong>ed by this architecture; the other two are Collection Services and a Reference Index Service. 167
While the Collections Service is still be<strong>in</strong>g def<strong>in</strong>ed and seeks to “provide an abstract <strong>in</strong>terface to sets
of similarly structured objects” the more explicitly def<strong>in</strong>ed and mature Reference Index<strong>in</strong>g or RefIndex
service “associates a permanent reference (a CTS URN, or a Collection identifier) with either a second
permanent reference, or a raw data value.” Reference <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g services encompass mapp<strong>in</strong>gs
traditionally called <strong>in</strong>dexes, such as a lemmatized <strong>in</strong>dex of a text, as well as other k<strong>in</strong>ds, such as the
mapp<strong>in</strong>g of a commentary onto relevant parts of the text.
The most thoroughly def<strong>in</strong>ed component of the CITE architecture is the CTS specification/ protocol/
service. The CTS protocol extends the hierarchy of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records (FRBR) conceptual model for bibliographical <strong>in</strong>formation developed by the International
Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). 168 FRBR def<strong>in</strong>es a work as a “dist<strong>in</strong>ct <strong>in</strong>tellectual or
artistic creation,” an expression as “the <strong>in</strong>tellectual or artistic realization of a work,” a manifestation as
“the physical embodiment of an expression of a work,” and an item as “a s<strong>in</strong>gle exemplar of a
manifestation” (IFLA 1998). In other words, Homer’s Iliad is a work, but an English translation by a
particular translator is an expression, an 1890 pr<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g of that particular translation by Macmillan is a
manifestation, and an <strong>in</strong>dividual copy of that pr<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g on the library shelf is an item.
163 http://www.jstor.org/
164 http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/dig<strong>in</strong>c/techpub/cts
165 For an overview of how CTS URNs and the CITE architecture have been used <strong>in</strong> the HMT project, see Smith (2010).
166 CITE is not a formal acronym, but <strong>in</strong>stead represents that range of material that the CTS protocol <strong>in</strong>tends to support, specifically: “Collections of
structured objects, <strong>in</strong>dexes, texts, extended objects.”
167 http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/dig<strong>in</strong>c/techpub/cite
168 http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records