Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Another significant manuscript project is Parker on the Web, 403 a multiyear project of Corpus Christi
College, Stanford University Libraries, and Cambridge University Library, to create high-resolution
digital images of almost all the manuscripts <strong>in</strong> the Parker Library. This project has built an “<strong>in</strong>teractive
web application” to allow users to exam<strong>in</strong>e manuscripts with<strong>in</strong> the “context of support<strong>in</strong>g descriptive
material and bibliography.” There are more than 550 manuscripts described on this site, and almost all
of them were numbered and cataloged by M. R. James <strong>in</strong> his 1912 publication (James 1912). The
onl<strong>in</strong>e collection also <strong>in</strong>cludes some volumes it received after the publication of the James catalog.
Limited free access to the collection is provided; full access is available by subscription.
St<strong>in</strong>son (2009) explored the digitization of these two projects and their consequent effects upon
manuscript studies and codicology <strong>in</strong> particular. He noted that <strong>in</strong> the RRDL, all digital surrogates were
connected to codicological descriptions s<strong>in</strong>ce many important features of manuscripts as physical
books can be lost when represented <strong>in</strong> digital form. In addition, s<strong>in</strong>ce no comprehensive catalog or
reference work existed that conta<strong>in</strong>ed either descriptions or a full list of all the Rose manuscripts, the
project team wrote many of these descriptions themselves. In contrast, Parker on the Web was able to
create marked-up descriptions of the entries for manuscripts <strong>in</strong> the M. R. James catalog. This very
process however, led them to some important conclusions:
Yet <strong>in</strong> mark<strong>in</strong>g up both sets of descriptions—one custom made for the web, the other a
digitized version of a pr<strong>in</strong>ted reference work—for <strong>in</strong>clusion <strong>in</strong> digital libraries, and <strong>in</strong> design<strong>in</strong>g
and implement<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>terfaces for access<strong>in</strong>g XML-encoded descriptions and the surrogates to
which they are l<strong>in</strong>ked, it has become apparent that <strong>in</strong> digital form the relationship of
codicological descriptions to the books they describe has, like the relationships of critical
editions to the texts they document and represent, undergone fundamental change (St<strong>in</strong>son
2009).
The digital environment has changed codicological descriptions <strong>in</strong> three major ways, accord<strong>in</strong>g to
St<strong>in</strong>son: (1) new purposes and uses have been discovered for these descriptions, particularly <strong>in</strong> terms
of their specific and technical language; (2) the relationship between a codicological description and
codex has moved from a one-to-one to a one-to-many relationship between “codices, descriptions,
metadata and digital images”; and (3) where once books were used to study other books, digital tools
are now be<strong>in</strong>g used to represent and analyze books. These <strong>in</strong>sights also emphasize the larger
realization that when pr<strong>in</strong>ted reference works are digitized—particularly when the knowledge they
conta<strong>in</strong> is marked up <strong>in</strong> a mean<strong>in</strong>gful way—they can take on whole new roles <strong>in</strong> the digital world. 404
St<strong>in</strong>son described how codicological descriptions were typically created by experts us<strong>in</strong>g a formalized
vocabulary to summarize dates, orig<strong>in</strong>s, owners, and contents of books, among other items, and that
these descriptions were used either by visitors to a library who wanted to use a manuscript or by
scholars study<strong>in</strong>g the manuscript remotely. In digital libraries, however, St<strong>in</strong>son argued that digital
images of codices serve as the “mach<strong>in</strong>e readable forms of the orig<strong>in</strong>al artifacts” and that “XML
encoded codicological descriptions are the secondary <strong>in</strong>formation used to describe, analyze and
<strong>in</strong>terpret these artifacts.” While codicological descriptions are still needed for the dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of
specialized knowledge (such as for the palaeographical and literary histories of <strong>in</strong>dividual
manuscripts), St<strong>in</strong>son argued that their purpose of physical description and provid<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation to
403 http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions/page.doforward=home
404 For further consideration of how digitized historical reference works can be used <strong>in</strong> new ways, see Crane and Jones (2006) and Gelernter and Lesk
(2008).