Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270088
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-19 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A project under way at Virginia Tech is making available for study on the Internet a rare collection of sci-fi books and periodicals, now in the special collections section of the university's Carol M. Newman Library.
The project is starting slowly. In its first year, only four magazines have found their way onto the computer screens so far.
"It seems small just because there are only four up there, but it's the hours and hours that you put into it," said Rania Lisas, one of the project volunteers.
The project is the brainchild of Len Hatfield, an associate professor of English who has taught some of the half-dozen or so science fiction courses offered at Tech since the genre became respectable.
The key is the William J. Heron Collection of Speculative Fiction purchased by the library in 1989. More than 5,000 magazine issues published between 1926 and 1987, plus some 11,900 paperback books from 1939 to 1987, covering an estimated 95 percent of all American science fiction published during those times make up the collection. It includes runs of about 200 different magazines and represents the work of more than 2,200 writers and editors and 1,000 artists. It is, in short, a time machine for seeing what those many vanished sci-fi products were like.
The collection would never have been available to Virginia Tech if Heron had not gotten married in 1987. His wife said he would have to choose between her and the thousands of books and magazines that lined shelves stacked to his ceiling.
"My Dad read the stuff when I was a kid," said Heron, 47, an engineer who lives in Charlotte, N.C. By the time he was in the fourth grade, Heron was reading it, too. "I started buying for both of us," he said. "I'd read them and then I'd have to keep them so he could read them."
But Heron's original collection was destroyed in a 1978 fire, and he gave up the hobby - until he was browsing in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tenn. He overheard the proprietor turning down an elderly woman's offer to sell him some of her 2,000 old sci-fi magazines because she and her husband were moving.
Heron ended up buying them, and continued seeking others from dealers catering to old pulp magazine enthusiasts. "I was single and I had lots of money and no sense," he said. "I was reading a book a day."
Now he has given it all up, although he admits to an occasional twinge when he spots a bookstore. "I have to stay away from it. I'm still tempted by it," he said.
When he decided to unload his collection, he wrote about 30 colleges and universities. Some expressed interest but only Virginia Tech made an offer, he said.
Gail McMillan, the library's special collections director, said the original idea was to augment the library's historical and technological collection of aerospace archives with publications showing what writers predicted for aerospace early in the century.
The delivery process has taken seven years. It was only in 1994 that the last of the paperbacks arrived. They now fill a section of the labyrinth of bookshelves in the Special Collections chamber, where the library staff is gradually boxing them in ways to slow their deterioration from the acid in the paper.
The paradox of having such a resource, but realizing that it would take only a few scholars examining a fragile pulp magazine to leave it in flakes, prompted Hatfield's idea of preserving the works on-line.
He and McMillan talked about how they might be made available to researchers, sociologists, scientists, teachers, students, science fiction fans or anyone interested in the growing field of speculative fiction. The stories, art, essays, letters and even the advertisements represent a peephole into the past.
Hatfield began lining up volunteers. One of his first was Lisas, who earned her master's degree in English at Tech and found her interest moving from reading science fiction to studying it. Timur Snoke, an undergraduate majoring in technological education, and Marc Zaldivar, an English instructor at Tech, are also working on the project. "They're friends or students of mine or people who are interested in science fiction," Hatfield said.
The volunteers scan the magazine cover to cover, putting each page into the system, including illustrations and depictions of how the columns of text looked. The text is also translated into word-processing documents which offers another advantage: "Because this is digital information, it can be searched," Hatfield said.
Information from other sources is used for the computerized cross-referencing,
The magazines are held together by a couple of staples, explained Eric Ackermann, a library assistant who has worked on the project. They are taken apart carefully and reassembled, then sealed to preserve them in a kind of suspended animation.
It all takes much time and volunteer effort, though. Hatfield is looking to a future where grants might be secured for the project and more volunteers recruited. Potential volunteers can reach Hatfield on e-mail at len.hatfieldvt.edu or in Williams Hall.
Copyright on material now being made accessible to anyone on the Internet should have run out long ago. As the project, called the The Virginia Tech On-Line Speculative Fiction Project, slowly advances toward the present with the on-line publications, it could run into problems where the estates of well-known authors have renewed copyrights. If a particular story in a magazine poses a copyright problem, Hatfield said, it would simply be removed from Internet access and made available within the university only.
"I'm interested in being contacted by anybody who has a concern about it," he said. "I don't want to steal anybody's profit. My goal is a scholarly goal and an educational goal. ... I want to be up front about it."
"I'm glad somebody's enjoying it," Heron said of his collection.
Although other science fiction collections exist, Heron said the only one of which he is aware which exceeds his belongs to lifelong collector Forrest J Ackerman of Los Angeles. If the project succeeds, it will be the only one generally accessible to scholars, sociologists, students of pop culture and many others who might be interested in it.
The idea was to "make these rare materials available and then, once we've done so, let's see how we can make them useful," Hatfield said.
by CNB