The idea for Early Encounters came from an undergraduate course I took some 20 years ago at University College London – American Literature I – taught by Stephen Fender. I remember it because I found it fascinating to see how the early accounts of exploration and discovery were paralleled in today’s literature, film, and television. It was exciting and surprising to see the themes of Star Trek so clearly visible in works written almost 500 years earlier.
It’s hard not to get excited by the foundation literature of North America. Indians, Africans, Europeans, and Americans were working out their futures in a complex web of tribal and imperial rivalry, interacting with each other at the most intimate and personal levels.
At that time, there were several barriers that prevented me from getting to grips with the primary documents that told the story.
The volume of material is enormous, and much of it is encyclopedic in nature. That is to say, small parts of the work are intensely important for certain disciplines, but very few users find that they need to read a work in its entirety.
The focus of the many microfilm collections was on exploration and discovery, rather than on native peoples or the environment. In addition, most collections restricted themselves to books. As a consequence, they tended to omit works written by American Indians and failed to include items such as speeches and other material that occurred within other books, journals, or newspapers.
The magnificent prints and illustrations of fauna, flora, and American Indians by Catlin, Catesby, De Bry, and others were extremely hard to find outside the rare book room. Even where reproductions were available, they were expensive and often were delivered individually rather than as a book.
Thanks to our experience with North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, we already knew that the collection would be particularly suited to our form of indexing. Items such as the Jesuit Relations, comprised of letters, diaries, and other materials, could be considerably enriched, enabling scholars to search for all materials sent from particular individuals, with particular subjects, and at particular time periods.
As a consequence, we began work on a database entitled Native America. Its focus was to have been all materials pertaining to early explorers. The indexing was to be oriented around expeditions, allowing scholars to ask questions such as, “What expeditions in New England from 1620-1700 had more than 5 fatalities?”
Late in 2000, I visited Father Francis Prucha at Marquette University, who kindly gave me lunch and the best part of an afternoon. His response to our concept was mixed. He pointed out that American Indians was the preferred term and that several of the works we were proposing to digitize were suspect. For example, captivity narratives were frequently more fiction than fact. In response to his comments and others, we decided to be clearer about the project concept. We renamed it Exploration Narratives: Encounters with the New World and planned to do an American Indian database later.
At the Association of College and Research Libraries meeting, librarians expressed continued interest in the project, but there was still something wrong. It was hard not to notice that customers picked up the brochure less frequently than for our other products. We continued to listen to customers. One adviser suggested that the name of the database was still not right, because it didn’t truly reflect the content. People encouraged us to be more explicit and to explain in depth what kind of materials we’d be including. What exactly were exploration narratives, anyway?
I take full responsibility for the next name change. In retrospect European Explorers and Settlers: Original Accounts, Letters, Logbooks, Journals and Diaries was a pretty disastrous move. The name was almost as long as some of the works in the database. Moreover, the switch away from the American Indian portions of the material made the collection less attractive to most customers.
Matters reached a head during a visit to Alice Schreyer, at the University of Chicago. She was refreshingly forthright. As I recall, her comments went something like this: “Frankly, Stephen, I don’t think we need another database on dead, old, white men. The scholarship is old, unfashionable, and rarely practiced now.” Clearly, yet another revision of the product design was needed!
By now we had made presentations to more than forty academics and individuals. We had additional editorial advisers on board. As an ethnologist, Father Ray Bucko from Creighton University brought a wealth of experience on American Indian peoples. Michael Edmonds from the Wisconsin Historical Society brought an interesting new perspective, in that he had been using early primary texts to document environmental conditions. He pointed out that these texts were the only source we had for understanding a wide range of environmental issues. Until now, he explained, the size and unwieldy nature of the texts had prevented their being used for this purpose, but indexing could change all that.
Professor Harry Liebersohn at the University of Illinois encouraged us to focus on the encounters aspect. He had recently published Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. Suddenly, it all became clear. We would model the database on Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, to which Cindy Shelton at UCLA had pointed us. We would change our bibliographies away from exploration and towards encounters. We would attempt to balance the American Indian, European, American, and African perspectives. We would pay special attention to finding African and American Indian material that was buried within archives and within other texts. We would focus on how humans interacted with each other and their environment.
This was a substantive change that required us to find and adapt new bibliographies, build additional database files, revise the indexing, and rework the mark-up.
The bibliographic challenge was to find works that would allow us to expand our selection of American Indian material. We identified A Bibliography of American Indian Writers as a potential source for materials written by American Indians. This let us identify extremely early material as well as numerous items of interest buried in American Indian journals of the time. We also found a number of speeches and other primary materials reported by Europeans but which displayed Indian views.
Indexing challenges
Once the purpose of the product became clear, the indexing challenge became evident. Our advisors had indicated that there were no fewer than nine major ways in which the texts were likely to be used. Among them, ethnologists would be interested in viewing documents by the peoples they described; naturalists would want to extract materials pertaining to fauna and flora; environmentalists would want to pull out descriptions of places based on when the observations were written; historians would want to see the documents organized by date; a wide range of patrons would want to see the material organized by the locations described.
In response, we began the creation of nine controlled vocabularies. Each of these would serve as a backbone along which we could present relevant material. As I write this, those controlled vocabularies now contain more than 25,000 terms.
The new intention of the database was to enable, to an unprecedented extent, the analysis of interaction among peoples. This also required a new approach.
To begin with we needed to define an “encounter” and its key elements. An encounter took place between peoples, at a particular place, at a particular time. We came up with a definition and built a special database from the original materials. This table would, for the first time, allow users to see a chronological table of the major encounters, with one-click access to the primary materials that describe them.
The encounters database was also built to include fielded data indicating the “where, when, who, and what” of each encounter. The user could then consult the encounter database and jump directly to the relevant materials. It made it possible for users to answer perplexing questions with ease – for example, “How do the encounters between the Spanish and the Indians compare with those of the French and the Indians?”
One of the hardest decisions was what portion of a document to point to. A particular chapter might include multiple encounters. Some encounters might run over several chapters. This presented a challenge, because the original works had not been constructed with this in mind. Quite the contrary, chapters, paragraphs, and entire books were often created to reflect the bravery and the achievements of the explorers. This led us to break the texts into smaller documents of a few pages or paragraphs, with the divisions at convenient points.
The database was due to launch late in October 2001. We decided to delay the launch by a month, based on requests from a variety of customers to add additional functionality to our image database – people wanted quick access to the exciting images that the database contained. We had always intended to include key images, but we decided that we could expand the ways in which users could access them. So just before product launch, we created a new image-based table of contents that enables users to find what they are looking for quickly.
Like the stories it contains, Early Encounters in North America has itself been a journey of exploration and discovery. We changed paths several times, as we made new discoveries that allowed us to make a better end product. Our thanks to you – our customers, our partners, and our colleagues – for showing us the way.
I hope you enjoy it!
StephenRhind-Tutt, President
Alexander Street Press
