Hilary 2011 - IT Services - University of Oxford

Need More Technical Support?
NSMS support researchers IT requirements through a
range of services aimed at providing resources for well
defined costs and for short medium or long periods.
VM4Rent: Rent a Virtual Server for anything from 1
month to many years. Allows full access to install,
configure and maintain your system.
Premium Web Hosting: NSMS can support your project
website on a range of technologies and with support from
a team of experts. Design assistance can be provided by
the OUCS Web Consultancy service.
IT consultancy: NSMS can provide consultancy on any
area of IT provision for a research project. With skills
in a wide range of topic such as virtualisation, storage
provision, clustering, web service provision and many
more, NSMS is in an ideal position to assist.
For further details on any of these services please see
out website www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nsms or why not call for
discussion about your project on 01865 273209.
Did You Know About ... ePub?
The success this year of the Apple iPad has brought
the ePub standard to new prominence, as the format for
electronic books, used by the excellent iBooks program.
ePub is an open standard for ebooks owned by the
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The format
is really rather simple: it is a zip archive of HTML files,
just the same ones you used for the web, with associated
CSS files, images etc, and a set of metadata files written
in XML which provide information like a table of contents,
and reading order.
William Godwin’s Diary: An InfoDev Case Study
About the project
The William Godwin’s Diary project has transcribed,
edited, and annotated 48 years of William Godwin’s diary
from 1788-1836. The diary is a resource of immense
importance to researchers of history, politics, literature,
and women’s studies. It maps the radical intellectual and
political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on
publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic
circles and theatrical production over the same period.
One can also trace the developing relationships of one of
the most important families in British literature, Godwin’s
own, which included his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-
1797), their daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and his
son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Many of
the most important figures in this period of British cultural
history feature in its pages, including Anna
Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles
James Fox, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft,
Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles and Mary Lamb,
Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
William Wordsworth, and many others. The
resource, which includes complete images
and detailed full-text transcriptions, is freely
available at http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Training project staff
One of the appropriate technologies for marking up such
texts are the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative
(www.tei-c.org). TEI P5 XML is a de facto standard
for the encoding of digital text which over the last
couple decades the University of Oxford has become
international leaders in the support and development in
their role as a TEI Consortium host. Two members of
InfoDev are fortunate enough to be elected members
of the TEI Technical Council and so help to shape
the ongoing developments of this important set of
recommendations.
Planning the project
OUCS’s InfoDev team (www.oucs.ox.ac.
uk/infodev) provided research advice and
support. It was involved in planning the funding
bid for the project and helped specify the
technical components of the bid and assisted
in specifying technical solutions that were
both appropriate and feasible. This was
a collaborative inter-departmental project
between Politics, OUCS and the Bodleian. The
bid was successful in receiving funding from
the Leverhulme Trust.
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