FIRST BOOK TO BE PUBLISHED ON WORLDWIDE INTERNET
 BY A UNIVERSITY PRESS WILL FOCUS ON VIRGINIA'S 
EXTENSIVE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY RECORDS

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Jan. 25 -- Beginning next month, a
significant resource for scholars and anyone interested in
African-American history will be available via computer network
throughout the world.
	The University Press of Virginia will publish the first
on-line book by a university press when it releases an updated
version of its "Afro-American Sources in Virginia:  A Guide to
Manuscripts" on the Internet, marking the start of Black History
Month. 		
	Prepared in collaboration with the University of Virginia
Library's Electronic Text Center and the University's Information
Technology and Communication department, the guide by Michael
Plunkett, the library's director of special collections, is an
important resource for anyone researching African-American history
and culture because of the state's significant role in those
fields.  The illustrated, hypertext book will be available at no
charge.
  	The Virginia press aims to add African-American resource
guides for other states to an electronically published series and
eventually to begin publishing a variety of books on the worldwide
Internet, said Nancy Essig, director of the press.  
	With some scholarly journals already published on-line, and
university press books and reference-resources sold in CD-ROM and
other software versions, "university press publishing is clearly
changing," Essig said.  "The role of the presses is dissemination of
knowledge and scholarship, and this is part of its future.  It's
exciting."
	The Virginia press's initial electronic book, updated from
its 1990 print version and including some 18 historical photographs
and images of key manuscripts, describes in detail the
African-American history holdings of the 26 institutional
collections in Virginia.  The collections, in libraries and
institutions throughout the state, range from early plantation
records to diaries and letters to minutes of modern-day civil-rights
movement meetings.
	Internet users who have a World Wide Web program such as
Netscape, Lynx or Mosaic can access the illustrated hypertext
version at http://www.virginia.edu/~press/ The University Press
catalogue is also available on-line.
  	An important aspect of the electronic guide is that its
complete resources can be rapidly searched by key-word, subject,
name, historical period or geographic location.  Its sharp
electronic images of photographs and manuscript pages are included
to give a hint of the visual records to be found in the statewide
collections, said David Seaman, director of U.Va.'s Electronic Text
Center, which also has available on-line the full texts of thousands
of literary and other works from many centuries for use in
electronic scholarship and teaching.
 	Addresses, phone numbers and other information are included
for each Virginia collection listed in the African-American source
guide.
	Collaboration among university presses, libraries and
computing centers is proliferating, said Essig, who chairs the
Association of American University Presses' Library Relations
Committee this year.  Such electronic publishing initiatives are
under way on more than a dozen campuses, she noted.  Virginia's is
the first project to be up and running.
	Although the Virginia press's initial electronic publication
is free, university presses as well as commercial publishers are
looking closely at possible models for charging for on-line
publishing of books, Essig said.  While they are not profit-making
enterprises, university presses will need some sort of mechanism to
recover costs involved in electronic publishing, she said.  The
Virginia press will keep track of how much its first electronic book
is used on the Internet.
	The African-American resource guide was chosen partly
because it is valuable not only to scholars but to the general
public's growing interest in genealogy, Essig said.  It also
reflects the press's emphasis on African-American studies in its
book publishing program.
	Publishing it on-line has involved the complex work of
"tagging," or electronically indexing, its text for computerized
searches, said Seaman, director of the widely used Electronic Text
Center.
	In addition to researching by time, period, place and names,
users can search the entire holdings of African-American historical
records in Virginia by asking for all reference mentions of
key-words, for example "miners" or "runaways."  The ability to
conduct detailed searches makes it a more extensive resource than
the original printed book, Seaman said.
	The African-American resource book can also be seen as a
work in-progress or "living document," because it can be regularly
updated, said Plunkett, who travelled to libraries and archives
throughout Virginia to prepare the original book and has updated it
for the electronic version.  
	Collections in the book include such documents as the papers
and letters of individuals and families; state, city and county
documents and records; church and Bible records; material from the
Works Project Administration Folklore collection; black college and
institutional archives; medical records, civil rights records and a
variety of other material. 
	Virginia is especially important to African-American studies
because until the mid-19th century it had a larger African-American
population than any other state, and its economics and culture
differed from the large cotton plantations of the Deep South,
Plunkett said.
	 Many of the Virginia collections have been used by scholars
writing on the history of slavery and the African-American
experience, but many topics, including local and regional history
subjects, and significant sets of individual papers, are ripe for
more research, he said.
	The collections include large ones such as at U.Va., the
Library of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, and the College of
William and Mary, and less publicized but important ones such as at
Virginia State University, as well as smaller institutions and
libraries.
	For additional information contact the University Press at
upressva@virginia.edu or (804) 924-3468.
###
January 24, 1995
	A demonstration of the electronic publication will be given
as part of the "Commemoration of Black History Month" program
jointly sponsored by the University Press of Virginia and the
University of Virginia Libraries.  The program is open to the public
and will be held in the Dome Room of the Rotunda on Wednesday, Feb.
22, at 7:30 p.m.  Also featured will be a lecture by Ervin L. Jordan
Jr., associate curator of special collections at the U.Va. Library
and author of the new book, "Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in
Civil War Virginia," published by the University Press of Virginia.

	For interviews or demonstrations please contact:
	Nancy Essig, director, University Press of Virginia, (804)
924-3468 or upressva@virginia.edu

	Michael Plunkett, director, U.Va. Library Special
Collections, (804) 924-3025 or mfp@virginia.edu 

	David Seaman, director, U.Va. Library Electronic Text
Center, (804) 924-3230 or etext@virginia.edu