[Electronic Text Center] [Alumni]

David Seaman

David Seaman was the founding director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library from 1992-2002. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation.

The Etext Center maintains an on-line archive of tens of thousands of XML and SGML texts, with 2,000 of them available in multiple ebook formats (over 7 million Microsoft Reader files delivered in the first two years of availability). We are delighted to have tens of thousands of users a day from all over the world coming to use our resources, and their feedback helps to improve our services.

David Seaman holds a B.A. in English Studies from the University of East Anglia, Norwich (1984), an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut (1986), and has an incomplete Ph.D. in Medieval English at the University of Virginia. For the past seven years he has taught etext and internet courses in the annual summer Book Arts Press Rare Book School at Virginia.

His published work includes studies of Chaucer, and he speaks and writes frequently on various aspects of humanities computing, travelling often in the US and Canada, and including international trips to Munich, London, Paris, Sydney, Perth, Glasgow, Oxford, Bielefeld, Kiel, Hamburg, Berlin, Tuebingen, Oslo, Ronneby, Tsukuba Science City, Osaka, Tokyo, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Trier, Pisa, and Wellington, New Zealand.

Accounts of David's work at the Etext Center have appeared in national publications as diverse as The Economist, The Chemical and Engineering News, Publishers Weekly, Wired News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Australian Financial Review.


Video clip (2mb)


[UVA Electronic Centers] [Electronic Text Center Home] [UVA Library]