In recent weeks Digital Production Group (DPG) has provided tours and instruction on digitization workflows and best practices for two Rare Book School classes, Digital Approaches to Bibliography & Book History and XML in Action:  Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts. After an overview by Christina Deane, head of DPG, several student employees demonstrated specific steps in the digitization process then answered questions. Here is the story in images:

Victor Naturale, a student employee who has worked on the McGregor Fund digitization project since its inception, discusses camera settings, best practices for image capture and assembly, and appropriate handling of rare books. He emphasizes the Quality Assurance process that requires several staff members to review and approve work before publication or delivery to a customer.

As a participant examines the original document, Robert Rust, student supervisor, demonstrates the potential of multi-spectral scanning to enhance and even reveal hidden or obliterated texts by capturing multiple images using wavelengths from UV to Infra-Red then post-processing the images.

Divya Babu discusses our use of Media Pro software to develop a catalog of images. She explains our descriptive metadata process and guidelines.

Ariadne Rehbein, intern for Collections, Access, and Discovery, explains her project to improve access to the Small Special Collections Library’s manuscript collections. Responsible for converting a set of legacy finding aids in Word Document format into EAD XML, she is using and advising the development of a new tool created by Mike Durbin at the UVa Library that programatically converts files from DOCX to EAD XML. The converted aids will be imported into the Library’s new content management tool for archival data, ArchivesSpace, and will be made available through the Virginia Heritage database.

Digital Curation Services (DCS) congratulates the graduating members of our student staff and thanks them for their contributions to successful digitization of numerous rare books, images, and manuscripts from the University of Virginia Library Special Collections:

• Sanchay Gupta, Computer Engineering
• Shannon Hees, Environmental Science and Economics
• Chelsea Kenney, Sociology
• Caitlin Secrist, Communication Disorders and Spanish

We asked them to share their thoughts about working in Digital Curation Services and to tell us about their future plans.  Here’s what we learned:

Sanchay Gupta, who worked for DCS during the past academic year, will join the banking firm Capital One in July.   He describes his initial experience with DCS as challenging:  “There are a lot of small details that you have to focus on and make sure you are doing them before you can move on to the next step,” a common theme we heard.  What Sanchay found most memorable was the amount of time it took to assure the best quality product for the customer.  In his career he expects to see benefits from the attention to detail that he developed in the DCS, along with his increased patience.

Chelsea Kenney also spent the past academic year working in DCS, where she achieved her goal of working in a library.  She enjoyed working with rare materials, including manuscripts and 16th century books.  Chelsea views the DCS as a good technology learning opportunity and expects to apply some of these skills in her teaching career.  First, though, she will spend the next year completing her Master of Education through Liberty University’s online program.  With a special interest in middle school teaching, as a result of her recent internship in Philadelphia, Chelsea plans a career that begins in the classroom and leads to management as a principal and then school superintendent.

Caitlin Secrist has been with DCS for 2.5 years, 1.5 of which were as a student supervisor.  She values the team approach, especially for thorough quality assurance.  For Caitlin it is still exciting to see the new digitization projects: most memorable for her are Steinbeck’s manuscript for Grapes of Wrath, Borges’ poems with extensive doodles by the author, and an unpublished Faulkner manuscript.  Through working with these she felt a connection with the authors and believes these opportunities are what keep the student staff engaged in the digitization process.  Caitlin’s next step is graduate school in Speech-Language Pathology at University of Texas at Austin.  Her summer in Ecuador at a school for the intellectually challenged stimulated her interest in early intervention through working closely with families.

Our best wishes to all!

We have reached the 100th volume milestone in the digitization of McGregor Library rare books on early European exploration of the Americas.  Focusing initially on the non-English language works from the earliest in the collection (1475) to approximately 1675, the project, funded by the McGregor Foundation, aims to provide access to materials heretofore unavailable in digital format.

Our milestone item is volume 2 of the 11-volume set [Atlas maior] Geographia, quae est Cosmographia Blaviana, by Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu published in 1662.  At 22 inches high and with double page plates of maps, some with color, it presented special handling and capture challenges for successful digitization.  Look, for example at this map of eastern Sweden:  it contains several beautiful cartouches as well as a series of municipal coats of arms along the left side.

Access online:  http://search.lib.virginia.edu/catalog/uva-lib:2429986/view.

Several volumes recently scanned as part of the McGregor Foundation’s digitization grant feature volvelles. And what is a volvelle? At its simplest, a volvelle comprises multilayered discs or dials that rotate above the page. The parts of the volvelle were printed on dedicated pages so that the reader could cut, remove, and assemble them on the appropriate page within the text using decorative glue caps or string. The earliest volvelles are attributable to Matthew Paris, an English Benedictine monk responsible for the 13th-century manuscripts constituting the Chronica Majora, and Ramon Llull, whose 1302 manuscript Ars Magna currently resides in the British Library.  These and other early volvelles were designed to answer both simple and complex questions related to religion and mysticism.  By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, volvelles were appearing in astronomy and geographic texts, providing efficient summaries of data or serving as simple calculators.

In the McGregor Collection

Four of the first fifty volumes scanned from the McGregor collection contain volvelles:  three editions of Peter Apian’s Cosmosgraphicus and the revised edition of the Arcano del Mare of Sir Robert Dudley.

Cosmographicus.  Peter Apian (“Petrus Apianus”) published Cosmographia in Bavaria in 1524.  An introduction to astronomy and geography, it remained one of the most popular books throughout the century. The first edition featured four volvelles: a device for determining the horizon line, an altitude sundial, a meridian device, and a lunar clock.  A revised edition published in 1545 by Gemma Frisius, an astronomer and instrument-maker in Louvain,  replicated all of the original volvelles.  When Frisius published a second edition in 1550, however, he added a fifth: a nocturnal, an instrument for determining the time by observing the position of certain stars.  The importance of the volvelles to the popularity of the Cosmographia is open to debate.  The Collection also features an abridgment of the book published in Paris that omitted them entirely.

Arcano del’Mare.  Sir Robert Dudley’s Dell’Arcano del Mare (On the Mystery of the Sea) was the only successful maritime encyclopedia in the 17th century that did not originate in the Dutch Republic. The initial four-volume publication (1646-1647) was groundbreaking: “it was the earliest printed sea atlas to cover the entire world; the first compiled by an Englishman; and the first to base its charts on the map projections used by Mercator” (C. Rider). For Dudley, the volvelles were important navigational tools.  In the two-volume revised edition published in 1661 owned by the McGregor Collection, the general maps are gone, but the charts and volvelles remain.

We recently posted that the UVa Library had received a very generous grant from the McGregor Foundation to digitize a number of volumes from the McGregor Library, which includes many rare and historically significant books related to the European exploration of the New World. The Library was collected by Detroit philanthropist Tracy W. McGregor and donated to the University in 1938.

Well, the project is underway! Here are some images of the very first volume being scanned:

DCS student assistant Caim Stewart begins scanning
the first volume for the McGregor digitization project.

We’re now three weeks into the digitization effort, and are excited that the first volumes are available online through Virgo! Volumes will continue to be added every week.

Click on the links below to view or download images from the first five volumes.

Pii II Pontificis Maximi Historia rerum ubique gestarum : cum locorum descriptione non finita, 1477

De vita et beneficijs salvatorie Jhesu cristi devotissime meditationes cu[m] gratiaru[m]actione, 1490

Zachariae Lilii Vicentini : Canonici Regularis Orbis Breviarium fide, compendio, ordineq. captu ac memoratu facillimum foelix et gratus legito, 1493

Be [i.e. de] ora antarctica per regem Portugallie pridem inuenta, 1505

Situs orbis Dionisij Ruffo auieno interprete, 1508

Images from the first volumes digitized by the McGregor project.

Digital Curation Services staff were featured in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on the challenges of preserving born-digital scholarship: Born Digital, Projects Need Attention to Survive. The article describes the work that DCS director Bradley Daigle, together with Matthew Stephens, Sustaining Digital Scholarship Programmer, and Lorrie Chisholm, Content Migration Specialist, have done to steward an early UVa digital humanities project. Valley of the Shadow, a project begun in the early 1990s by historian Edward L. Ayers, is an online library of primary source documents about two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Since 2009, Digital Curation Services has been working to standardize and update the technology used in the site, ensuring that the project continues to function and be accessible as its technological environment evolves. To learn more about the project and the work required to maintain born digital scholarship over time, click over to the Chronicle of Higher Education website.

From left to right, Matthew Stephens, Bradley Daigle, and Lorrie Chisholm. Image by Andrew Shurtleff for The Chronicle.

The McGregor Fund has awarded the University of Virginia Library a $245,000 grant to support a three-year effort to digitize a significant portion of the McGregor Library.

The McGregor Library of American History was donated in 1938 by the McGregor Foundation. The Library includes many rare and historically significant books related to the European exploration of the New World, and was collected by Detroit philanthropist Tracy W. McGregor.

The $245,000 grant will go towards making the collection more accessible to the public by digitizing 300 books from the McGregor Library and providing high resolution images of their pages online through the UVa Library’s online catalog. Volumes included in the digitization project are a 1495 Italian verse translation of Christopher Columbus’ official report of his first voyage and a 1613 etching from explorer Samuel de Champlain’s original sketch, depicting a July 30, 1609 battle where Champlain and a band of Huron Indians defeated a superior Mohawk force.

All of the digitization will be accomplished in-house in our own Digitization Studio starting in January. Keep an eye out for new McGregor volumes to begin showing up online soon!

To read more about the award, check out the UVA Today article here: Grant Awarded to U.Va. Library Will Make Unique Collection Available Online