Manuscripts

The Digital.Bodleian website, launched yesterday, includes more than 100,000 images covering everything from beautifully illustrated manuscripts and centuries-old maps to Victorian board games and Conservative Party election posters from the last 100 years.
For the first time the public can view digital versions of library materials, many of which were only previously accessible by obtaining an Oxford University Bodleian Libraries’ readers card.

This is a detailed description of the Text to Image Linking Tool (TILT) one of the winners for the British Library Labs competition 2014. It has been reposted on the Digital Scholarship blog on behalf of Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber, University of Queensland.

TILT is born again

NTT Data Corporation today announced its deployment of a new application for accessing and browsing the Vatican Apostolic Library’s digital archive online, enabling people to view digital reproductions of more than 4,000 ancient manuscripts at the Library’s website.
This new Vatican Apostolic Library’s digital archiving system can also be accessed at the portal site maintained by Digita Vaticana, an affiliated foundation that raises funds to support the Library’s preservation projects.

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories.

Metadata go through an evolutionary process from creation to archival preservation. During this process, some metadata are re-used (inheritance), other metadata are eliminated (extinction) and still others are updated or newly generated (mutation). Unlike other literature that focuses on metadata inheritance and mutation, this evolutionary view highlights the extinction of metadata. As such, it might raise awareness about the appraisal and selection of metadata in digital curation practice.

Here at OCLC Research we’re always eager to find ways to ensure that our projects have strong positive impact on our professional community, and we’ve clearly hit the mark with our Demystifying Born Digital work agenda. I was reminded of this yesterday upon seeing the news that SAA’s Manuscript Repositories Section is going to reprise its 2013 “Jump In” initiative. What’s that, you say? Read on.

from The Signal - Physical general collections in academic research libraries are in declining use. As these collections become commodities–goods for which demand is broadly supplied without dependence on brand or other differentiation–a longstanding rationale for academic libraries is eroding. To counter this, academic libraries need to highlight another traditional function: “gathering and curating of rare and unique documents, including primary source materials.

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

The use of large, comprehensive collections of printed books and journals has seen a massive decline at North American research libraries in recent years—an effect of the shift in scholarly publishing from an analog and print-based model to a digital and networked one. However, during these past two decades of radical change and energetic response, I believe we have missed a much more important shift, one that poses a more direct and existential threat than the one posed by the move from print to online.

Due to the rapidly burgeoning volume of born-digital records, it behooves archives to determine how they can best bridge the gap between handling analog and handling born-digital records. In addition to analyzing existing case studies of repositories that already accession and process electronic records, the study presented in this paper used both a survey instrument and semi-structured interviews with archivists to investigate whether and how manuscript repositories are handling born-digital materials.