SETIS | University of Sydney Library (original) (raw)

Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS)
The Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) was created as a part of the Sydney Digital Library service. One of the first major digitisation projects undertaken in Australia, the primary purpose of SETIS when it was developed was to provide a scholarly electronic publishing and digital library platform to support and further the programs and goals of the University and the Library.

From 1996 until 2022 SETIS provided access to a large number of networked and in-house full text databases, primarily but not exclusively, source texts within the humanities. It was initially used as a platform to allow commercial text databases such as Chadwyck-Healey’s English Poetry database, to be accessed across the University. Later, in addition to these literary, philosophical, and religious texts, SETIS hosted University of Sydney created text and image projects, primarily made up of out of copyright publications, using standards such SGML, XML and the P5 guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagging. Digital texts were created through double-keying of texts and delivery in XML. Many of these University of Sydney Library created texts were later migrated to Australian Digital Collections (ADC).

In achieving this purpose SETIS:

• contributed to the Library being recognised as a leader and active partner in the scholarly communication process within the University and beyond.
• became an established digital library service creating and maintaining a range of scholarly resources to support research and study across the University and beyond.
• provided expertise and skills in digital conversion and publishing for both the Library and the University
• formed new partnerships and collaborations with academics, other libraries and institutions

Contributors

• Dr Creagh Cole worked in the University of Sydney Library from 1980 until 2010 and was the original coordinator of SETIS.
• Sten Christensen
• Ray Penn
• Pauline Dickinson
• Conal Tuohy
• Alan Light
• Chris Floyd (contributor of texts)

Funding

SETIS was funded initially in 1995 by a grant from the University of Sydney Information Technology Committee, and by the Faculty of Arts. It continued to be funded through external funding sources, either through grants or private sponsorship of individual works.

Collections

• Text collections, including the University’s first online commercial databases and networked resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Early English Books Online
• Digitised sections of Rare Books and Special Collections items:
  • The Book of Hours (sic)
  • Decretals of Gregory IX (sic)
  • Officium Tenebrae (sic)
• The first digital version of a thesis, Dr. Glenn Shea's five volume The Systematics and Reproduction Of Bluetongue Lizards of the Genus Tiliqua (Squamata: Scincidae)
• The Australian Federation Full Text Database, a searchable corpus of the Federation debates in the 1890s and the memoirs of the participants, leading up to Australian Federation in 1901.
• Australian materials, including the transcribed or digitised versions of:
  • Eyre, Edward John (1815-1901) Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia (1845)
  • Part of the Joseph Henry Maiden Botanical collection (with the remainder hosted on Australian Digital Collections)
  • Lawson, Henry, misc Henry Lawson Manuscripts
  • New Australia Newspaper
  • Nicholson, Evelyn (1867?-1927), Diary of a Trip to Australia and Diary of a Trip to Australia: Associated Watercolours
  • Sturt, Charles (1795-1869), Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia (1849)
  • Sturt, Charles (1795-1869), Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1833)
  • White, John (1757/8-1832), Journal of a Voyage to NSW (1790)
  • Banks, Sir Joseph, Australian Butterflies from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
• Selected fanzines from the Science Fiction Collection
• Selected archaeology CD-ROMs from the Archaeology Computing Laboratory
• Australian Key Journals: Periodicals Contents Index
• Sydney University Press’ Challis Shakespeare project
• Faculty projects including:
  • Mary Shelley’s Biography of William Godwin, by Dr. Judith Barbour
  • Poet John Tranter’s website
  • Professor Nicholson Manuscript "Thinking in French"
  • Is Democracy Possible? by John Burnheim

Archive

The SETIS archive can be found on the Wayback Machine

Bibliography

Burrows, T. (1999), "Electronic texts, digital libraries, and the humanities in Australia", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 248-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378839910289330

Christensen, S. (2009). Sydney eScholarship Repository. Case Study. Educause Australasia, Perth, Australia, https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/5027

Cole, C. (1997). SETIS: electronic texts at the University of Sydney Library. Ariadne, (8).

Coleman, R. (2006). Sydney University Press-publication, business and the digital library. VALA: Connecting with users, Melbourne, Australia https://www.vala.org.au/vala2006-proceedings/vala2006-session-8-coleman/

Coleman, R. (2008_). Scholarly publishing within an eScholarship framework–Sydney eScholarship as a model of integration and sustainability_. International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB), Toronto, Canada, https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/2646/ELPUB_2008_Coleman.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Coleman, R. (2009). Publishing and the digital library: Adding value to scholarship and innovation to business. Learned publishing, 22(4), 297-303. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1087/20090406