Dear medieval-religion
Allow me to introduce myself as a new list member. My name is
Caroline Howlett, and I am the Development Editor for Medieval Studies
at Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.
Chadwyck-Healey has followed the discussion on the Patrologia Latina
Database with both interest and a growing frustration at its lack of
accuracy - but why bother to let facts get in the way of a little
mud-slinging?
Anselm Cramer is incorrect in saying that PLD started at a price of GBP
34,000. In fact it started at GBP 25,750 and five-and-a-half years
later has increased to GBP 27,000.
Bella Millett says that the point of electronic texts is universal
accessibility. Well, fine, but the cost of developing such databases
is enormous - several million pounds in the case of PLD - and it can
only be recouped through sales. Mark William's comments are
refreshingly realistic, though I'm not sure even 'hard-nosed' is the
right term for our pricing policy - we simply looked at the costs of
production and the number of potential sales and arrived at our price.
Six years on from starting the project, it looks like we got them just
about right and will in due course recover our investment. Shares in
PLD would have made no one rich, however. We have always regarded it
as a very high-risk project with a commercial return which most
publishers would find laughable, but we wanted to do it.
Rozanne Elder asks about regional or consortium access to PLD. We
have made national and state-wide agreements for PLD in a number of
countries, which have made PLD far more widely available than it
otherwise might have been. It's not a question of bringing group
pressure to bear on us, simply of talking to us. We are very open to
such approaches. Bella Millett mentions CHEST in the UK and is
correct when she says that we have had no approach from it or from the
body which provides its funds, but we'd be happy to talk.
Martin Howley says informed opinion says that the CETEDOC search
engine is superior. It depends on which informed opinion you are
listening to. The combination of PLD's software and its SGML-coding
make it searchable in most ways imaginable and the web version now
gets over the difficulties of using five CD-ROMs.
Julia Barrow's remarks about chimpanzees are gratuitous, offensive to
those who worked on the conversion of the printed texts and plain
inaccurate. We were well past the 'prototype' stage two or even
three years ago and the overall accuracy of the conversion was
already extremely high. We did have problems with a few passages but
these have also been corrected. This is not to claim that PLD is
free of keying errors, and we have always been grateful to users who
have pointed out errors which we have been able to correct and will
continue to do so in the future. Dr Barrow is welcome to take a look
at the current edition.
As for Frans van Liere's comments, I think PLD will come some way
behind Oasis and the Spice Girls in the queue in the pirate pressing
plants in Beijing.
We would, of course, take piracy (in China or anywhere else) very
seriously, but we would take equally seriously more legitimate
approaches and suggestions from scholars and librarians which would
enable us to make PLD more widely accessible. It's now available
online on subscription at less than 10 per cent of its purchase price
on CD-ROM. How else would you be prepared to pay for access? A
month's loan? On a per-search or per-session basis? Through
consortium agreements? We'd be interested to hear from you.
Caroline Howlett
Development Editor
Chadwyck-Healey Ltd
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