Dear all,

I am a strong believer in community/collaborative effort too. There is,
however, some hesitation I have vis-à-vis each researcher taking their own
images. In addition to the already mentioned issue of creating some
organised archive/access point(s) for this kind of distributed resource,
there are issues of quality control (will everybody remember to add
information on resolution, size, colour fidelity etc.?) and, of course,
copyright. But then, at least they would be accessible to many.

Here is another thought: many of us textual scholars are already in the
possession of digital images of mss. What would be the ethical/legal issues
involved in sharing these for research purposes only? It would save the
overloaded ditization departments time (and - if they are to be believed -
they would not loose money, since they only charge for 'real costs'). I
would gladly make mine available, but have the feeling that copyright issues
would stand in my way. Any comments?

Best wishes to all,

Juan

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Juan Garcés
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
Kay House, 7 Arundel Street
London WC2R 3DX
T: +44 (0)20 7848 1393
F: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

-----Original Message-----
From: The Digital Classicist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Roger Pearse
Sent: 12 June 2006 07:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Getting images of manuscript pages online

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 <><