Hello,
This is most interesting. I agree entirely with the idea of a community
effort -- there will never be the money for institutions to do their own
collections themselves. I've been photographing medieval mss at abbeys
and small colleges around Europe for a while now, and putting them
online (with permission) to get people studying the things. Why not
harnass all these retired classicists etc? The 'silver surfers' have
the time!
I was most interested to hear that the National Archives have discovered
the digital camera! I will contact them.
You mention the British Library, as if they also allowed this. But I
have been pressing them through my MP to allow me to photograph 3 late
manuscripts for a while. Their last answer was to suggest that they
make some black-and-white microfilms and let me scan those (nearly
impossible, of course). Do you know of more forward-thinking people
there? (But I'm going to keep hassling them).
The wiki-type things should really be hosted at the owning institutions,
I'd have thought. I'd like to upload images of pages of books
somewhere!
Roger Pearse
In article <[log in to unmask]>
, Melissa Terras <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Hi All
>
>I think this is both a problem and an opportunity for the field....
>the National Archives, in the uk, for example, allow people to bring
>in digital cameras and take photos, and if you go to the reading rooms
>of a day there are usually a fair few people who have come to "do" the
>archive, taking digital images of the manuscripts and archival
>material, then going home to do the research later. It seems to me
>that there should be a central repository somewhere where people can
>add images of items - like a wiki but for archival and manuscript
>material - and the general community add annotations. At the moment
>all these hours of digitisation are "lost" to anyone else - and the
>archive cant afford to digitise these things themselves.
>
>This is espectially pertinent for areas not terriby to do with
>classics... I'm thinking geneaology, where you have to pay a
>commercial firm a lot of money to see their digital version of a
>record, as the archives could afford the digitisation. I think that
>in the future this approach - the community digitisation effort -
>could be harnessed (much in the way project gutenberg has done for
>plain texts) to provide an online virtual archive. I know for a fact
>that there are legions of "silver surfers" who ask the national
>archives and british library (just 2 examples) what they can do to
>"help" - and this is a resource that remains untapped. It all depends
>if you trust the general public to enter archival and manuscript
>information, etc, or if they can get access to take digital pictures
>of the archives in the first place - but it could be a useful
>approach?.
>
>of course, I dont have the time nor the resources to set up something
>like this online - but what do people think?
>
>Melissa
>
>
>>
>> >
>> >On 6/10/06, Roger Pearse <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> >> I don't know whether this is relevant to this forum, but is there
>> >> interest in the question of how to get the raw material, the
>> >> manuscripts, onto the internet where we can all study them?
>> >>
>> >> Now that everyone carries a digital camera around as part of their
>> >> mobile phone, it would be possible for scholars who access mss to simply
>> >> snap the pages as they work; were it not that most institutions (who
>> >> don't themselves record or place online much themselves) strictly forbid
>> >> it. Otherwise a million hands would make a lot available very quickly.
>> >>
>> >> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
>> >>
>> >> All the best,
>> >>
>> >> Roger Pearse
>> >> The Tertullian Project (tertullian.org)
>> >> Additional Fathers online in English (tertullian.org/fathers)
>> >> QuickLatin (quicklatin.com)
>> >> Promoting interest in Tertullian studies <><
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>> The Tertullian Project (tertullian.org)
>> Additional Fathers online in English (tertullian.org/fathers)
>> QuickLatin (quicklatin.com)
>> Promoting interest in Tertullian studies <><
>>
>
>
The Tertullian Project (tertullian.org)
Additional Fathers online in English (tertullian.org/fathers)
QuickLatin (quicklatin.com)
Promoting interest in Tertullian studies <><
|