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

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remote scholars has evolved <strong>in</strong> a digital environment. Physical description can still be important s<strong>in</strong>ce
digital repositories often misname files rather than mak<strong>in</strong>g mistakes <strong>in</strong> foliation and pag<strong>in</strong>ation, and “a
break <strong>in</strong> a digital codex might as easily be the result of a lost file as a lost leaf <strong>in</strong> the physical book it
represents.” Even more important, the extensive descriptive <strong>in</strong>formation once <strong>in</strong>tended to aid remote
scholars now provides new means for “sort<strong>in</strong>g, classify<strong>in</strong>g and compar<strong>in</strong>g collections of manuscripts.”
Although 17,000-word transcriptions, St<strong>in</strong>son admits, cannot easily be put <strong>in</strong>to a relational database,
specific <strong>in</strong>formation can be extracted from them:
… the precision and specificity of the language of codicological descriptions, developed to
convey a substantial amount of <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> a small space (a necessity <strong>in</strong> pr<strong>in</strong>t reference
works if one wishes to avoid prohibitive cost and unwieldy volumes) now facilitates databases
that provide highly flexible, searchable, and sortable relationships between the orig<strong>in</strong>al artifacts
(St<strong>in</strong>son 2009).
In fact, as described above, the RRDL provides access to a complete database created from much of
the codicological <strong>in</strong>formation and it can be viewed onl<strong>in</strong>e, downloaded as a spreadsheet, or used to
search or sort this <strong>in</strong>formation “across the entire corpus of manuscript descriptions.” 405
The second major change St<strong>in</strong>son listed was how the new many-to-many relationship between a
codicological description, its codex, and the images that constitute the digital surrogate has created a
series of complex relationships that must be represented <strong>in</strong> a digital library environment. Codicological
descriptions <strong>in</strong> a digital environment can be hyperl<strong>in</strong>ked not just to digital images of the codex itself
but to digitized items listed <strong>in</strong> its bibliography, biographies of illustrators, and, <strong>in</strong>deed, to any related
scholarly <strong>in</strong>formation that is available onl<strong>in</strong>e. These codicological descriptions then not only cont<strong>in</strong>ue
to serve as guides to the pr<strong>in</strong>ted codices and their digital surrogates but also, because they have been
marked up <strong>in</strong> XML with def<strong>in</strong>ed data categories, can be used to create databases and <strong>in</strong> comb<strong>in</strong>ation
serve “as a large searchable “meta-manuscript” that conta<strong>in</strong>s comb<strong>in</strong>ed data from numerous physical
codices and thousands of digital images” (St<strong>in</strong>son 2009).
The f<strong>in</strong>al <strong>in</strong>sight offered by St<strong>in</strong>son underscored how the pr<strong>in</strong>t environment has expanded the potential
for pr<strong>in</strong>ted reference works that were once used solely to study other books, for these reference works
can now be turned <strong>in</strong>to digital tools that can then provide much more sophisticated opportunities for
analysis. He asserted that pr<strong>in</strong>ted codicological descriptions, such as those found <strong>in</strong> the James catalog,
suffer from the same challenges of many pr<strong>in</strong>ted critical editions, <strong>in</strong> particular, they <strong>in</strong>clude a large
number of “abbreviated and coded forms” known only to experts. 406 Such abbreviated forms were
used as space- sav<strong>in</strong>g devices that are no longer necessary <strong>in</strong> a digital environment, and St<strong>in</strong>son thus
<strong>in</strong>sists that much of the data embedded <strong>in</strong> codicological descriptions “lies latent” until it is “unleashed”
by digitization. At the same time, he argued that the digitization of manuscripts and their codicological
descriptions offered a new opportunity to move beyond simple digital <strong>in</strong>cunabula: 407
The rubrication, historiated <strong>in</strong>itials, and foliated borders of <strong>in</strong>cunables rem<strong>in</strong>d us that <strong>in</strong> the
early days of pr<strong>in</strong>t the concept of what a book should be was dom<strong>in</strong>ated by the manuscript
codex. Dur<strong>in</strong>g recent centuries, the opposite is true; descriptions of manuscript books bear
witness to the dom<strong>in</strong>ance of pr<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> form<strong>in</strong>g our collective notion of what a book should be.
… As we seek to liberate our codicological descriptions from the constra<strong>in</strong>ts of “be<strong>in</strong>g
405 http://romandelarose.org/#data
406 Bodard (2008) and Roueché (2009) have observed similar opportunities of expand<strong>in</strong>g specialist abbreviations <strong>in</strong> the digital editions of <strong>in</strong>scriptions, and
Rydberg-Cox (2009) has described the challenges of digitiz<strong>in</strong>g abbreviated texts found with<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>cunabula.
407 The need to move beyond “digital <strong>in</strong>cunabula” has been articulated <strong>in</strong> Crane et al. (2006).