Dan O'Donnell wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-13-06 at 09:55 +0100, Juan Garces wrote:
>
>> Starting with small archives could be a good way to start...
>>
>> One set of arguments is usually overseen by archival institutions: making
>> lower quality images available hightens the demand for higher quality images
>> of the same ms, images of other mss, and autopsies of the ms. While the
>> latter might not be desired that much, I think the the first two arguments
>> can be convincingly made. It would be good for libraries, even if (or
>> particularly if) they use income generated from the imaging department for
>> further imaging and conservation.
>
> I very much like this idea and with Google Books, book imaging is
> certainly in the air at the moment. However, my experience is that MS
> libraries are very conservative about this kind of thing, and they might
> be happier if there were some kind of formal initiative rather than a
> bunch of scholars with cell phones.
>
> Not quite sure how to develop this but it seems like an excellent idea.
Strangely enough, Classicists are not the only people to be thinking along this
line. As Juan certainly knows there is interest in this by a large number of
medievalists, having seen the success of EEBO. Hence the recent AHRC ICT
Methods Network workshop on
"Large Scale Manuscript Digitization" See
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/textual_scholarship.html recently
organized by Peter Robinson.
I look forward to the report from that meeting.
-James
--
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk
Ask me about free long-term preservation for your electronic texts!
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