Vagaries of a licensed resource

["James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Patrologia Latina, the 19th century collection of Latin writings 
of the church fathers, has been an available Internet resource 
from Chadwyck-Healey (originally), and now ProQuest since the 
1990s.  The digital version was created by double-keying offshore 
with proofreading.  It was controversially expensive, but is held 
and used in major research libraries.  The corresponding set of 
Greek church fathers, Patrologia Graeca, was not done 
commercially, but has been done by Religion and Technology Center 
Inc., a US firm, at a lower level of sophistication (digital page 
images mainly), and is also licensed by various institutions at a 
price; they propose an xml version in future.  The texts in PL 
and PG overlap but are far from duplicated by other general 
interest Latin and Greek "corpus" projects, so the specific 
projects retain value.

What now to make of www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu, which 
presents all of PL and PG at no cost to the end-user?  The 
website also includes other large collections of texts in Greek 
and Latin from the history of Christianity, also free, all 
presented in PDF files, but not as page images:  some digital 
text underlies that PDF and the layout is plain but crisp and 
contemporary.  The description on the site of how the texts were 
prepared is unsatisfactorily vague ("This digitalized edition has 
been obtained from the source using a proprietary special-purpose 
program.").  That site comes from a group that wants to make the 
teachings of the official Catholic church widely known and 
available, but they seem to have no official link to Rome or any 
traditional church body (order, university, etc.).  I have worked 
the site superficially this weekend and it seems to lack some 
useful features of the "old" PL in particular, but on the other 
hand a price of zero makes it an advantage to many.

The intellectually interesting question is this:  what does one 
have to do to be sure enough of the validity and reliability and 
preservability of this kind of "volunteer" resource in order to 
be able to give up paying for a version of the same thing that 
comes from an organization with a more robust infrastructure and 
whose lifespan and commitment to preservation can be more 
reliably predicted?  I suspect there is nowhere near one right 
answer to this question.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.