Goals

The overall goals of the project can be stated as an experiment in the following three areas:

• Preservation
  Most of the original materials in the Heron Collection are already deteriorating rapidly, printed as they often were on inexpensive, acid-based, pulp papers. By digitizing both text and graphics of the serials from cover to cover, we can then seal the originals so as to protect them from air and light (let alone additional handling). As paper recovery techniques become more effective at retrieving and stabilizing acid-based materials, we may eventually be able to stop and even correct the deterioration of these important popular culture materials.

• Improved Scholarly Access
  But preservation alone is not enough, particularly since effective physical preservation of these materials will make them practically unavailable for scholarly research on speculative fiction. As a result of the need both to publicize and disseminate the contents of these materials to interested scholars, therefore, we will convert the digitized texts and graphics into files tagged with the Hypertext Markup Language codes that make them accessible to scholars using a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Moreover, by placing these materials on a computer server which has direct connection to the Internet, we make these hitherto unavailable cultural artifacts suddenly accessible to scholars and other interested readers literally from around world.

  Moreover, because the newly digitized materials will be searchable and retrievable, the archived information becomes more amenable in some ways to scholarly work than it was even in its original physical form. In addition, the archive will contain not only the textual, but also high quality graphic facsimiles of the entire original magazine; these will enable users to study the artifacts from a variety of perspectives. Finally, it is our goal to encourage interested scholars to join the project, helping us to build hypertextual links among the many digitized originals in the VTSF archive itself, as well as helping to add additional collateral materials (texts, graphics, sound and video clips, etc.) to this archive, as well as to provide links to other relevant material in the World Wide Web. Such a web-work of materials should eventually be of considerable value not only to scholars of the fantastic, but to to cultural studies generally.

• A New Resource for Students
  Finally, one of the most exciting aspects of this project will be the attempt to use the archive for both undergraduate and graduate exploration and research. Undergraduate students and others will be able to view, read, search and retrieve materials in the VTSF Project archive as part of their class work or independently. Not only will this mode of dissemination make these materials freshly available to more students than ever before, but it will also allow the students themselves to participate in the ongoing development of the archive.

  Instructors will be trained in using the archive in their class designs, including, for example, through selective reading guides that will help students move through the archive to view thematically related texts and graphics. One of the major features of the VTSF Project archive will be its enabling students both to read widely in the holdings, but also to explore the range of cultural expressions captured in these materials. Students will study changes in the kinds and themes of the stories as popular literary forms, and they will also be able to see cultural attitudes in the letters, columns, editorials, and even in the advertisements and graphic designs.

  Graduate and advanced undergraduate students will be encouraged to learn the processes so that under supervision, they can add original materials to the archive, allowing them the chance to experience directly some of the aspects of textual and editorial work traditionally restricted solely to advanced graduate students and professional scholars.

Current Status