This interesting item from AWOL with useful advice and links:
“Freely available online”: What I really want to know about your new
digital manuscript collection
<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Awol-TheAncientWorldOnline/~3/xz6uzHk8hFk/freely-available-online-what-i-really.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email>
Posted: 13 Oct 2016 04:23 AM PDT
Dot Porter asks five important questions for those planning to put images
online
“Freely available online”: What I really want to know about your new
digital manuscript collection <http://www.dotporterdigital.org/?p=263>
*13* *Thursday* Oct 2016
Dot Porter in Dot Porter Digital <http://www.dotporterdigital.org/> ~
Development in production
So you’ve just digitized medieval manuscripts from your collection and
you’re putting them online. Congratulations! That’s great. Online access to
manuscripts is so important, for scholars and students and lots of other
people, too (I know a tattoo artist who depends on digital images for
design ideas). As the number of collections available online has grown in
recent years (DMMAP lists 545 institutions offering at least one digitized
manuscript <http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/app/>), the use of
digital manuscripts by medievalists has grown right along with supply.[1]
If you’re a medievalist and you study manuscripts, I’m confident that you
regularly use digital images of manuscripts. So every new manuscript online
is a celebration. But now, you who are making digitized medieval
manuscripts available online, tell us more. How, exactly, are you making
your manuscripts available? And please don’t say you’re making them *freely
available online*.
I hate this phrase. It makes my teeth clench and my heart beat faster. It
makes me feel this way because it doesn’t actually tell me *anything at all*.
I know you are publishing your images online, because where else would you
publish them (the age of CDRom for these things is long gone) and I know
they are going to be free, because otherwise you’d be making a very
different kind of announcement and I would be making a very different kind
of complaint (I’m looking at you, Codices Vossiani Latini Online
<http://www.brill.com/products/online-resources/codices-vossiani-latini-online>).
What else can you tell me?
Here are the questions I want answered when I read about an online
manuscript collection.
1. *How are your images licensed? *This is going to be my first
question, and for me it’s the most important because it defines what I can
do with your images. Are you placing them in the public domain, licensing
them CC0 <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>? This is
what we do at my institution <http://openn.library.upenn.edu/>, and it’s
what I like to see, since, you know, medieval manuscripts are not in
copyright, at least not in the USA (I understand things are more
complicated in Europe). If not CC0, then what restrictions are you placing
on them? Creative Commons has a tool where you can select the
restrictions you want and then gives you license options
<https://creativecommons.org/choose/>. Consider using it as part of your
decision-making process. A clear license is a good license.
2. *How can I find your manuscripts?* Is there a search and browse
function on your site, or do I have to know what I’m looking for when I
come in?
3. *Will your images be served through the International Image
Interoperability Framework <http://iiif.io/> (IIIF)?* IIIF has become
very popular recently, and for good reason – it enables users to pull
manuscripts from any IIIF-compliant repository into a single interface, for
example comparing manuscripts from different institutions in a single
browser window. A user will need access to the *IIIF manifests* to make
this work – the manifest is essentially a file containing metadata about
the manuscript and a list of links to image files. So, if you are using
IIIF, will the manifests be easily accessible so I can use them for my own
purposes? (For reference, e-codices links IIIF manifests to each
manuscript record
<http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/searchresult/list/one/kba/0003>, and
it couldn’t be easier to find them.)
4. *What kind of interface will you have?* I usually assume that a
page-turning interface will be provided, but if there is some other
interface (like, for example, Yale University, which links individual
images from a thumbnail strip on the manuscript record
<http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3519597>) I’d like to
know that. Will users be able to build collections or make annotations on
page images, or contribute transcriptions? I’d like to know that, too.
5. *How can I get your images?* I know you’re proud of your interface,
but I might want to do something else with your images, either download
them to my own machine or point to them from an interface I’ve built myself
or borrowed from someone else (maybe using IIIF, but maybe not). If you
provide IIIF manifests I have a list of URLs I can use to point to or
download your image files (more <http://www.dotporterdigital.org/?p=250>
or less <http://www.dotporterdigital.org/?p=266>, depending on how your
server works), but if you’re not using IIIF, is there some other way I can
easily get a list of image URLs for a manuscript? For example, OPenn
<http://openn.library.upenn.edu/> and The Digital Walters
<http://thedigitalwalters.org/>publish TEI documents with facsimile
lists. If you can’t provide a list, can you at least share how your urls
are constructed? If I know how they’re made I can probably figure out how
to build them myself.
Those are the big five questions I like to have answered when I read about
a new digital manuscript collection, and they very rarely are. Please,
please, please, next time you announce a new collection, try to go
beyond *freely
available online* and tell us all more about *how* your collection will be
made available, and what users will be able and allowed to do with it.
[1] In 2002 33% of survey respondents reported manuscript facsimiles “print
mostly, electronic sometimes” and 47% reported using “print only”. In 2011,
44% reported using them “electronic mostly, print sometimes” and 17%
reported using “electronic only”. This is an enormous shift. From Dot
Porter, “Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition,” *Scholarly
Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing* Volume 34,
2013.
http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2013/essays/essay.porter.html
--
June Samaras
KALAMOS BOOKS
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www.kalamosbooks.com
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