Last December, the final version of the PEP Archive 1 CD-ROM in dual PC/Mac format shipped to more than 1,600 customers throughout the world. Spanning a period of more than seventy years, the PEP archive CD-ROM contains all of the contents of six of the premier journals in psychoanalysis: The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (Vols. 1–75), JAPA (Vols. 1–42), The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Vols. 1–63), Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (Vols. 1–48), The International Review of Psycho-Analysis (Vols. 1–19), and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Vols. 1–30). The PEP Archive 1 (1920–94) CD-ROM turns a personal computer into a rich psychoanalytic literature resource, amounting to an extensive and remarkably complete subject library on its own and comes with state of the art retrieval software.
The CD contains nearly 29,000 articles (more than fourteen million words) and 2,000 figures and illustrations that originally resided on more than 180,000 pages. The underlying paper journals, purchased by a library (if still available), would cost some $50,000.
This PEP launch, a joint project between the APsaA and the Institute of Psychoanalysis (London), marks the culmination of many years of hard work. Each of the PEP directors — Alice Brand Bartlett, Peter Fonagy, Nadine Levinson, Martin Miller, Paul Mosher, and David Tuckett — have been devoted to making PEP a reality. Judith Schachter, who previously served on the PEP board, and Ellen Fertig also deserve our gratitude.
As early as 1992, the idea of having a consolidated CD-ROM of the full text of the journals was first proposed by Paul Mosher. While the idea seems perfectly obvious to everyone now, it was anything but obvious in the early 1990s when hardly anyone in our field could imagine the power of a CD-ROM.
Vann Spruiell led a pioneering organizational attempt to produce a disc. That effort was taken on by the PEP (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing) team. In 1995, Neil Shapiro, a technical consultant, together with Mosher, Fonagy, and Tuckett, designed the system structure. The text of psychoanalytic journals would be categorized so that the most sophisticated researches could be undertaken.
The archive program can search the entire disc for all papers written on aphasia; or the search can be as specific as a search for one word, e.g., “aphasia” written by Anna Freud in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child between 1940 and 1945. Further, any references to the word “aphasia” that may appear in a paper title or in a list of references can be excluded. The disc categorizes the data by name of journal, year of publication, and type of text (article body, title, reference, or author name). This system of categorizing makes up the structure of the database.
Once the structure was worked out, the PEP board had to find a search engine that could be programmed to execute complex searches using the data structure that we had defined. Taking into consideration such factors as cost, speed; ease of use, and the way search results were presented to the user, we chose Folio Views. More importantly, Folio Views could be developed for both Mac and PC computers. For this task of programming the search engine, we selected the software company Galaxy.
The next task was arranging for all the text in the six journals to be digitized, i.e. turned into data that could be stored electronically on computer. In addition, the text had to be coded to mark it as belonging to one or more of the search-defined categories. We chose a firm that gave us the highest accuracy for the least expenditure. Although we live in an electronic age, it was cheaper to have all the text retyped into a computer than have it electronically scanned and the tags added afterwards. To complicate matters further, the original text in the earlier publications proved to have many spelling mistakes.
Great geographical distances separated the PEP board members. We functioned by keeping in constant contact with each other via e-mail — one continuous board meeting that has been going on since we began in 1996. Although different tasks were delegated to different members of the board, all correspondence is circulated to the entire board in classic e-mail list fashion. All decisions are made with the consideration, consent, and support of all board members. Tuckett and I have taken over the planning and implementation of global sales and marketing.
Early in 1996 the first beta (test) version of our CD-ROM was released for the PC. In 1997 the Mac beta version was released. Folio Views developed a new version of its search engine for the PC, but for some time delayed further development of the Mac version. We decided to incur the extra expense of developing a special Mac version and supporting our Mac customers, about 25 percent of our customer base.
We had planned to have our final disc out by summer 1998, but we were forced to extend the beta testing period for both PC and Mac versions. This delay gave us more time to “fix” design problems, bugs, and errors. Customers were kept up and running by a variety of measures. After ending our contract with Galaxy, we took upon ourselves the final design implementation and programming under Shapiro's direction. In November 1998, the FV 4.1 search engine for Mac was released, allowing us to have a final disc in a dual platform as originally planned. In addition, the PEP disc permits use over a local area network (LAN). This means that the disc can be installed on one server and, if licensed, can provide simultaneous access to networked computers throughout a library.
This project has remained feasible in large part by keeping administrative costs abnormally low. Each director took on work in his or her area of expertise, thus saving many hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, we conduct our own in-house customer service and licensing; we developed our own specialized PEP help file; and there is now a PEP Web site (). To complete these momentous tasks, members of the PEP board have worked on the project an average of two to three hours a day since 1996 — a total of at least 6,000 hours. During this time, more than 10,000 e-mail messages passed between board members.
PEP is very proud of its success in producing a very high quality and well-functioning disc. We have worked hard to provide dedicated customer service support for our clients, from users new and unfamiliar with any computer application to quite sophisticated users. We are almost finished with the extremely complicated process of acquiring non-profit status. We anticipate this to have been completed by the end of the first quarter of 1999.
PEP now can turn its attention to making the best use of its considerable investment and expertise. The directors are considering several
Nadine Levinson, D.D.S., is the president of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. She serves as treasurer of the American Psychoanalytic Foundation and is a member of the Budget and Finance Committees of the APsaA and the IPA. She is a training and supervising analyst for the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has a psychoanalytic practice in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
simultaneous and complementary paths forward. Work is under way to produce Archive 2, which should be available by November 1999. It will extend the literature in Archive 1 through 1997. Look for sales and ordering information on our Web site at , e-mail , or fax requests for information to 011-44-171-323-5312.
In addition to the PEP CD-ROM's LAN capabilities, we are currently testing Internet access to the PEP archive using an ordinary Web browser. This mode of delivery is necessary to meet the requirements of libraries and universities, who are moving toward Internet applications rather than networked computers.
Finally, we are developing a subsidiary disc for any other journals that want to participate. Initially, because the current CD is full, we will have to have a separate disc for the additional journals. Eventually, with DVD (digital versatile disk) technology, we will eventually have all the databases on one disc. Including the extra journals will bring their articles to the attention of a large user group including many universities and other institutions. We hope it will make every psychoanalytic journal better known, and we believe it will help to raise the profile of psychoanalytic scholarship as the journals' readership is potentially expanded. As you can see, the technology is in a state of rapid flux, but PEP has managed to stay current with these new changes in the service of advancing psychoanalytic literature.
At the American's May meetings and the IPA Congress in Santiago in July, look for a special PEP tutorial course being offered. Any PEP-related information can be found or requested at our Web site at .