Mimicing Touch as well as Sight - Microsoft at the British Library

The British Library have, in association with various other cultural heritage institutions in the UK, added to their impressive Turning the Pages application.

Various documents from the 12th to the 19th centuries, selected via a national competition, are now online.

The striking concept about the Turning the Pages it that is does not digitise the individual images of a book, but goes further in imitating the process of actually leafing through a book or manuscript - the software attempts to mimic not just visual appearance, but tactile appearance as well. The machines installed in the BL itself where one touches and drags the pages by pressing the actual screen are even more impressive than the online versions, a fact amplified by the larger and clearer monitor

The original Turning the Pages was developed using Shockwave, but the updated software is based on collaboration with Microsoft. I expect to see more such tools as the BL further establishes its Microsoft partnership

Funding long-term digitisation projects

The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online and the Darwin Correspondence Project are two of the longest running digitisation projects in the UK.

The International Dunhuang Project is a “ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.”. It is international project running since 1994, hosted at the BL and has over 140,000 relevant images online.

The Darwin Correspondence project aims to document and add scholarly apparatus to over 14,000 of Darwin’s letters (both received and sent). Hosted at Cambridge University, the project is a mixed media one, with both digital and print outputs.

Both are huge projects and are need of continued assistance to digitise all the items within its orbit - the Darwin project aims to have 30 printed volumes, and complete around 2025. (!)

But of course the difficult thing is to find continued funding for such projects. For funding bodies or charities there are diminishing returns in funding something which already has had some academic impact. The gains are less tanglible if one funds something which is not trying to innovate and is already established in the academic blood stream. Equally, a funder will have less say in the project if it is jostling against many other donors who have already funded it.

I’m not quite sure how this is solved! Potential fund raising needs to get that much innovative in order for the projects to reach their natural conclusion.

Digitisation Services

TASI has recently produced a list of some Digitisation Services based in the UK, along with their respective capabilities in terms of special services

The list is available from the TASI website..

Historical GIS 2008

Call For Papers is now open for Historical GIS 2008, a two-day conference on all aspects of using GIS in historical
research to be held at the University of Essex, UK on the 21-22nd August
2008.

For more information please see:

http://www.hgis.org.uk/HGIS_conference/index.htm

or contact Ian Gregory at: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk.