Project Helios

Another broadside from the Society of Southwest Archives.  Edward
Galloway, of Carnegie Mellon U. described and demonstrated HELIOS
(Heinz Electronic Library Interactive On-Line System), "a digital
archive of the papers of ... Senator H. John Heinz III."  This seems
to be a new generation of effort for digitizing collections
material, and it too was very impressive.  HELIOS is apparently
generously funded by various Heinz foundations, and estimates some
1M papers will be digitized and available electronically in the
foreseeable future.  Most significant, the project has focussed on
the development of software interfaces for scanning, OCR/quality
control and semi-automated finding aids, and access.  It's been
developed largely by archivists rather than techies, and the base
seems to be natural language searching.

There is a sort of hypertext capability that allows the user to
highlight keywords in a document to generate a list of other
relevant documents in the archives via the OCR capabilities of the
system.  I gather the software for all three applications (scanning,
indexing, access) is being developed with commercial availability in
mind.  Manuscript material is included in the collection, and OCR
capabilities are expected to be able to handle it at some future
point.  In the meantime, I believe it's being manually key-worded
for collateral access.

For information (a small brochure is available), contact Edward
Galloway <eg2nd [at] andrew__cmu__edu).

Karen Motylewski
Preservation and Conservation Studies
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1276
512-471-8291
Fax: 512-471-8285

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 8:93
                  Distributed: Wednesday, May 24, 1995
                        Message Id: cdl-8-93-006
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