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

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As part of this phase, the VMR at the University of Birm<strong>in</strong>gham 410 also plans to jo<strong>in</strong> with a parallel
VMR be<strong>in</strong>g built at the University of Münster <strong>in</strong> Germany and provide seamless access to both
collections. Four features dist<strong>in</strong>guish Interedition from previous manuscript digitization projects: (1) it
is designed around granular metadata, so <strong>in</strong>stead of simply present<strong>in</strong>g metadata records for whole
manuscripts, records are provided for each page image, for the transcription of the text on that page,
and for specify<strong>in</strong>g what text is on that page; (2) “the metadata states the exact resource type associated
with the URL specified <strong>in</strong> each record” (e.g., if a text file is <strong>in</strong> XML and what schema has been used);
(3) all VMR materials will be stored <strong>in</strong> Birm<strong>in</strong>gham’s <strong>in</strong>stitutional repository and be accessible
through the library onl<strong>in</strong>e public access catalog (OPAC), and (4) the VMR will support full reuse of its
materials not just access to them.
This fourth feature is perhaps most unique, for as seen by the survey of projects <strong>in</strong> this section, the
focus of much manuscript-digitization work has often been on support<strong>in</strong>g the discovery of digital
manuscripts for use onl<strong>in</strong>e rather than on the ability for scholars to get access to the raw digital
materials and use them <strong>in</strong> their own projects. The VMR plans to provide access to all the metadata they
create through a syndicated RSS feed so that users can create their own <strong>in</strong>terfaces to VMR data. In
addition, they plan to allow other users to add material to the VMR by creat<strong>in</strong>g a “metadata record for
the resource follow<strong>in</strong>g VMR protocols” and then add it to the RSS feed of any VMR project. The
importance of support<strong>in</strong>g new collaboration models that allow many <strong>in</strong>dividuals to contribute related
digital manuscript resources has also been discussed <strong>in</strong> Rob<strong>in</strong>son (2009, 2010).
While the amount of metadata about manuscripts, as well as digital images and transcriptions of
manuscripts, that have become available onl<strong>in</strong>e has <strong>in</strong>creased, there are still few easy ways to l<strong>in</strong>k
between them if they exist <strong>in</strong> different collections. A related problem is the limited ability to at least
partially automate the l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g of manuscript images with their transcriptions, even if both are known to
exist. Arianna Ciula has argued that the work of palaeographers would greatly benefit from descriptive
encod<strong>in</strong>g or technology that supported more sophisticated l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g between images and texts,
particularly “the possibility to export the association between descriptions of specific palaeographical
properties and the coord<strong>in</strong>ates with<strong>in</strong> a manuscript image <strong>in</strong> a standard format such as the encod<strong>in</strong>g
proposed by the TEI facsimile module or SVG” (Ciula 2009).
Recently Hugh Cayless has developed a series of tools and techniques to assist <strong>in</strong> this process that have
been grouped under the name img2XML 411 and have been described <strong>in</strong> detail <strong>in</strong> Cayless (2008, 2009).
As has been previously discussed by Monella (2008) and Boschetti (2009), Cayless noted that
manuscript transcriptions are typically published <strong>in</strong> one of two formats, either as a critical edition
where the editors’ comments are <strong>in</strong>cluded as an <strong>in</strong>tegral part of the text or as a diplomatic transcription
that tries to “faithfully reproduce the text” (Cayless 2009). While TEI allows the production of both
types of transcriptions from the same marked-up text, Cayless argued that the next important step is to
automatically l<strong>in</strong>k such transcriptions to their page images. While many systems l<strong>in</strong>k manuscript
images and transcriptions on the page level, 412 the work of Cayless sought to support more granular
l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g, such as at the level of <strong>in</strong>dividual l<strong>in</strong>es or even words.
410 The VMR at Birm<strong>in</strong>gham has been funded by JISC and is be<strong>in</strong>g created by the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Edit<strong>in</strong>g (ITSEE),
http://www.itsee.bham.ac.uk/
411 http://github.com/hcayless/img2xml
412 One such system is EPPT (discussed earlier <strong>in</strong> this paper), and another tool listed by Cayless is the Image Markup Tool (IMT),
http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/%7Emholmes/image_markup/<strong>in</strong>dex.php, which allows a user to annotate “rectangular sections of an image” by us<strong>in</strong>g a draw<strong>in</strong>g
tool with which they can first “draw shape overlays on an image” and then these overlays can then be l<strong>in</strong>ked to “text annotations entered by the user.”
(Cayless 2009).