Parker on the Web
Parker on the Web is a multi-year project to produce a complete, high-resolution digital representation of the manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and to build an interactive web application in which the manuscript page images can be studied in the context of editions, translations and secondary materials. As a by-product, the project also achieves important preservation objectives, since preservation-quality images will be archived consistent with current best practices for digital archives. The Parker Library is one of the three great early-modern libraries in England. Assembled by Matthew Parker (1504-1575), a passionate book collector, Master of Corpus and Archbishop of Canterbury (interalia), the library includes about a quarter of all extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, many great monuments of Old English, and some of the oldest surviving instances of English music and art. It consists today of 538 manuscripts in 546 physical volumes, which equate to about 192,000 imageable pages. The project is a joint undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University.
Following several preliminary phases undertaken from late-2002, a four-year production project was launched in July 2005. By the end of September 2009:
- all 538 manuscripts will have been imaged
- all original images (in TIFF format) will have been archived
- images suitable for web delivery (in JPEG2000 format) will have been derived from the TIFFs
- descriptive metadata (created as TEI-compliant XML files transformed into HTML via XSLT) derived from the M. R. James catalog of the library will have been created and mined to establish a sophisticated search apparatus for users
- critical bibliographies will have been developed for all manuscripts
- key editions, translations and secondary scholarship will have been identified and (where possible) digitized, and
- a website offering access to all of the above will have been created, tested by scholars, and made generally available to the research community in accordance with a sustainability plan developed in consultation with the Mellon Foundation.
Image capture (and capture of associated technical metadata) is the responsibility of Cambridge University Library, working in space provided by Corpus with two Linhoff Technika cameras fitted with Anagramm Picture Gate Salvadore scanning backs, and a third camera fitted with a Phase One P45 digital back, and custom cradles. Descriptive metadata creation and bibliography development are handled by a four-person research team at Corpus. Image processing and archiving, website development and the digitization and integration of secondary works and tools are managed at Stanford. The partners anticipate that a version of the website consisting of most functionality and part of the content can be made available before the end of 2007, with functional enhancements and additional content (primarily images, manuscript metadata, secondary materials and secondary source metadata to follow in 2008 and 2009.
