This project has made available William Caxton's two editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, probably printed in 1476 and 1483. The originals are both in the British Library.
The digitisation was undertaken by a team of 14 Japanese experts, including a professional photographer, bibliographers and IT specialists, all from the HUMI (Humanities Media Interface) project at Keio University in Tokyo. The work was directed by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya, a specialist in 15th-century English literature, and managed by Masaaki Kashimura.
The images are accompanied with a detailed background on Caxton
and his editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, carefully
structured to provide information for users ranging from
school-leaver age to the level of the specialist scholar.
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage.html
Johann Gutenberg's Bible was the first real book to be printed using the technique of printing, which Gutenberg invented in the 1450s. The British Library has two complete copies, one printed on paper and one on vellum (calf's skin). We also have an important one-leaf fragment, and the site also presents two other items in the British Library which are closely connected with Gutenberg's Bible, a school book and a letter of indulgence. The Gutenberg page makes it possible to compare the two complete copies.
The digitisation was carried out in March 2000 by ten researchers and technical experts from the HUMI project at Keio University in Tokyo and from NTT, under the direction of Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya.
The images are accompanied with a detailed background on
Gutenberg, his invention, his Bible, and on the special features
of the Library's two copies of the Bible. The background is
carefully structured to provide information for users ranging
from school-leaver age to the level of the specialist
scholar.
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.html
Collect Britain presents 90,000 images and sounds from the British Library, chosen to evoke places in the UK and beyond.
It includes:
Soon to be added are:
http://www.collectbritain.co.uk
On this site you will find all the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642. The Shakespeare quartos were digitised during 2003. The Library developed the web pages and search engine, while the digitisation work was done by Octavo, a company specialising in the creation of digital facsimiles of rare books and manuscripts.
The digitised quarto editions are placed in context by a brief
introduction to each play. These discuss the date the play was
created, and when it was first performed. The editions, in quarto
and in folio, are listed. Shakespeare drew on a variety of
sources to create his plays, and some of these are listed. Each
introduction includes the story of the play.
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html.
This site provides access to descriptions and images of a selection of the decorated manuscripts in the British Library, which has arguably the most comprehensive, and certainly one of the richest collections of medieval and renaissance illuminated manuscripts in the world.
The current phase of the cataloguing project (2004-2007) is a partnership between the British Library and the Centre for Manuscript and Print Study, Institute of English Studies, University of London, and is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.
The Project aims to provide unprecedented access to online
descriptions and images of all the western illuminated
manuscripts in the British Library. For the purposes of the
Project, illumination is considered to include all pictorial and
decorative embellishment, from fully painted miniatures to minor
decorated initials. By including such a wide range of material we
aim to provide a useful resource for those working in a variety
of disciplines, and also to show the Library's most celebrated
illuminated manuscripts in the context of their far more numerous
but correspondingly far less well known contemporaries.
The catalogue will ultimately grow to include roughly 10,000
entries. When complete, it will include:
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/
This database is a finding aid to the British Library's
bookbinding collections. It includes information and images for
selected items from the Library's rich collection of fine
bindings of books printed in western Europe from the fifteenth
century to date. There is also a selection from the valuable
bookbindings collections of the Library's partner, the
Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the
Netherlands). To date, there are over 5,900 illustrated records.
The database is a work in progress and its scope will be widened
as resources allow. It is hoped that more information on binding
structure will be included.
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/welcome.htm
Over 100,000 manuscripts, artefacts, paintings and textiles, discovered over the last century at archaeological sites on the Eastern Silk Road (Chinese Central Asia), are possibly the single most important source for world history in the first millennium AD. In over 20 languages and scripts, they are rich sources of information on the world civilisations of the period and on all the major world religions. One of the major find sites was a Buddhist Library of 40,000 manuscripts and paintings which was discovered at Dunhuang. But study of the items has been hampered by the fact that many are in need of conservation and cannot be handled. Furthermore, following their discovery they were dispersed to institutions worldwide making access difficult.
IDP is an international collaboration started in 1994 to address the conundrum of access versus preservation for the Dunhuang and other Eastern Silk Road material. Based at the British Library it has Cataloguing, Digitisation and Research Centres worldwide hosting multi-lingual web sites and interactive web databases giving free access to this material along with images, contextual information, educational sites, scholarly tools, maps, and much more. It currently offers:
As well as the British Library, there are currently IDP
Centres at the National Library of China, Beijing; the Institute
of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg; Ryukoku University, Kyoto;
and the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. IDP has been externally funded
since its inception from a variety of sources, trusts,
foundations and individuals. It currently receives funding from
the Leverhulme Trust, the Pidem Fund, The Mellon Foundation, the
Higher Educational Funding Council for England and the
Sino-British Fellowship Trust.
The Project was set up 1994. The website was launched in 1998 (in
English). It was redesigned and relaunched in 2002 (in English
and Chinese). It was again redesigned and relaunched in 2005 (in
English, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese, with German due by the
end of 2005). Website use has grown steadily. In the first 8
months of 2005 over 80,000 distinct hosts accessed the web sites,
transferring an average of over 530MB of data per day.
http://idp.bl.uk http://idp.nlc.gov.cn http://idp.orientalstudies.ru.
The earliest recorded excavations of a Buddhist monument in India happened at Amaravati between 1798 and 1817. The drawings that documented these excavations were collected by Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821) and are today held in the British Library. They depict plans of the site while it was being excavated, and the beautifully carved white limestone slabs that originally clad the outside of the Amaravati Stupa.
Many of the sculptures from Amaravati were later removed from the site, and are now in museums around the world. The most famous collections of Amaravati sculptures are in the British Museum and the Chennai Government Museum. By digitising the Mackenzie drawings from Amaravati, the locations of many of the sculptures recorded by Mackenzie have been successfully identified. It is hoped that these identifications will continue, and allow the international scholarly community to learn more about this once great Buddhist monument.
The World Corpus of Amaravati Sculptures Project is supported by
the Society for South Asian Studies.
http://www.bl.uk/collections/mackenzie.html
http://www.bl.uk/collections/amaravati/mackamaravati.html
http://www.britac.ac.uk/institutes/SSAS/projects/amaravati.htm
This is a collection of some 5,000 items of Victorian ephemera and occasional printing, formed by Henry Evans (c.1832-1905), a conjuror and ventriloquist, who performed under the stage name Evanion. The often colourful items fall into two main categories - popular entertainment, and everyday life - and include posters, advertisements, trade cards and catalogues, most of which date from the later 19th century. While London is particularly well represented, the collection includes items from all parts of the United Kingdom.
The resource makes the now extremely fragile original material
accessible through a fully searchable catalogue description,
alongside a digital image, where available. This is a work in
progress and images are currently being added.
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/evanion/welcome.asp/
Renaissance festival books describe and illustrate the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700 - marriages and funerals of royalty and nobility, coronations, stately entries into cities and other grand events. The resource contains digital images of 253 complete books, selected from over 2,000 in the British Library's collection. Each book and each image is associated with detailed descriptive metadata enabling in-depth searches of the contents.
The resource was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research
Council and is the result of collaboration between the Arts &
Humanities Research Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites
and Court Cultures at the University of Warwick and the British
Library.
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/homepage.html
Images Online gives users access to around 15,000 images from
the British Library’s collections; new images are being
added on a weekly basis. It offers search, order and purchase
facilities. Images can be supplied in low resolution JPEG format
(5MB uncompressed) or as high resolution TIFF files on
CD–ROM.
http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/britishlibrary/
The British Library began the Electronic Beowulf project in
1993: selected images from the project were among the first
pictures of medieval manuscripts to be mounted on the internet. A
digital camera was used to record images of obscured letters and
letter-fragments, to restore hidden letters to their place in the
manuscript. Professor Kevin S. Kiernan of the University of
Kentucky, the world's leading authority on the history of the
Beowulf manuscript, made use of new technologies to present a
completely new view of the sources for the Beowulf text. This
electronic version enables readers to place the original
manuscript's leaves side by side again, to examine the colour and
texture of the vellum leaves by magnifying the images and to
explore the work of the early scribes. It is supplied on two
CD-ROM discs.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/englishlit/beowulf.html
The British Library has a vision to make the world's
intellectual, scientific and cultural heritage accessible, and to
bring our collections to everyone - at work, school, college or
home. British Library Direct is a new service that fulfils part
of this vision.
The British Library Direct database covers the last 5 years'
worth of articles from our 20,000 most heavily requested serial
titles. It includes some 9 million articles, and covers most
subjects, languages and places of publication. Not all the
serials are stored in electronic form, but all the articles are
delivered electronically. You can search the British Library
Direct database without having to register. You do, however, need
to register if you want to order a copy of a document.
http://direct.bl.uk/bld/Home.do
Some of the British Library’s treasures are on display
using the Turning the Pages software. The website also explains
how other institutions can implement the software for their own
sites.
Turning the Pages is the award-winning interactive program that
allows museums and libraries to give members of the public access
to precious books while keeping the originals safely under glass.
Initially developed by and for the British Library, it is now
also available as a service for institutions and private
collectors around the world.
Turning the Pages allows visitors to virtually 'turn' the pages
of manuscripts in a realistic way, using touch-screen technology
and interactive animation. They can zoom in on the high- quality
digitised images and read or listen to notes explaining the
beauty and significance of each page. There are other features
specific to the individual manuscripts. In a Leonardo da Vinci
notebook, for example, a button turns the text round so visitors
can read his famous 'mirror' handwriting.
Turning the Pages can also be produced on CD-ROM and online, thus
making precious books available to a huge audience. Books can be
converted to two different standards - one suitable for
highlights, the other for entire volumes.
The British Library’s own pages include 14 texts:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/digitisation.html
The objectives of the Project are to digitise up to two
million pages of British national, regional and local newspapers
from microfilm, and to offer access to that collection via a
sophisticated searching and browsing interface on the Web.
The project will unlock hidden resources for the study of the
nineteenth century and the Victorian period, seen through the
pages of the British Library's extensive holdings of newspapers.
The content will focus on London national newspapers, English
regional newspapers, home country newspapers from Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland, and titles in specialist areas such as
Victorian radicalism and Chartism.
The project will reach out through the Web to UK Higher Education
and Further Education sectors, offering free access and a number
of search interfaces.
The Project is funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems
Committee.
http://www.bl.uk/collections/britishnewspapers1800to1900.html
The aim of the Project is to increase access to the British
Library Sound Archive's extensive collections of recordings and
supporting materials.
This innovative project will:
Initially, nine collections are being digitised, subject to licensing agreements:
The Project is funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems
Committee.
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/archsoundrec.html
The 700 or so bound volumes of newspapers and news pamphlets
gathered by the Revd Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the
largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news
media available at the British Library. The material is
overwhelmingly published in London, although there are also some
English provincial, Irish and Scottish papers, and a handful of
examples from the American colonies.
The original Burney volumes are now in a poor physical state, and
they are therefore restricted from ordinary reading room use.
Normal access is via a complete set of microfilms, which can be
copied. The British Library is also working towards making
digital facsimiles of the Burney newspapers available over the
internet.
http://www.bl.uk/collections/burney.html
http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/earlynewspapers.html
The Codex Sinaiticus, produced in the middle of the fourth
century, is one of the two earliest Christian Bibles. It includes
the earliest surviving copy of the complete New Testament and the
earliest and best copies of some of the Jewish scriptures, in the
form that they were adopted by the Christian Church. Just over
half of the original book, which is handwritten in Greek, has
survived and it is now dispersed between four institutions: St
Catherine’s Monastery, near the foot of Mount Sinai, where
the Codex was preserved for many centuries; the British Library;
Leipzig University Library in Germany; and the National Library
of Russia in St Petersburg. The British Library has the largest
surviving portion – 694 pages – which includes the
whole of the New Testament.
A team of experts from the UK, Europe, Egypt, Russia and the US
have joined together to reunite the Codex in virtual form. This
important international collaborative approach to achieve
reunification involves all four of the institutions which hold
parts of the manuscript. The project aims to make accessible and
reinterpret the Codex Sinaiticus for a worldwide audience of all
ages and levels of interest, employing cutting-edge new
technology and advanced scholarship. The project will include: a
detailed conservation assessment of the whole manuscript, carried
out with the aid of multi-spectral imaging equipment; full
digital imaging; a new transcription of the whole text; and the
creation of a range of products including a free-to-view website,
a high-quality digital facsimile and CD-ROM.
This project is only one of a number of digital initiatives where
the British Library Department of Western Manuscripts is
involved.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/asianafricanman/codex.html
The British Library Digital Object Management Programme was
set up in 2003. It is responsible for developing the IT
infrastructure for the National Digital Library.
The mission of the Programme is to enable the United Kingdom to
preserve and use its digital output forever.
Our vision is to create a management system for digital objects
that will:
One of the principal drivers of the National Digital Library is the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, which should come into effect some time in 2006 or 2007. This extends the present (pre-electronic publishing) legislation and places legal requirements on us.
The Programme will develop the technical solutions to the problems arising from having such digital objects in the Library's collections.
http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/dom/homepage.html
http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/legaldeposit.html
A key area for the British Library is to continue and expand our programme of digitisation. The projects to digitise a substantial proportion of our early British newspaper collection and significant sections of our Sound Archive are covered elsewhere. We also intend to
We have set up a Digitisation Strategy Project to define the British Library’s digitisation strategy over the next 4 years, including selection criteria, sustainability, funding, and management of intellectual property rights.
The Web Archiving Programme's mission is to extend the
Library's responsibility for the national published archive to
the web - by acquiring, preserving and making accessible
published material on the UK web. The British Library will take a
leading role in developing appropriate policies and standards in
partnership with other institutions nationally and
internationally.
The British Library is lead member of the UK Web Archiving
Consortium. The Consortium was formed in June 2004 to undertake a
2-year pilot project to investigate the issues of selection,
collaboration and the technical challenges involved. The other
members are the National Archives, the Wellcome Library, the
National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales/
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, and the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC). Each partner is archiving sites (with
permission from content providers) relevant to their interests.
The British Library has produced a collection development policy
which focusses on sites of cultural, historical and political
importance, including specific topic ‘collections’
relating to one-off events such as the May 2005 General Election
and the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The Consortium’s website, launched in May 2005, gives free
access to the pilot archive through a user-friendly interface.
Pages harvested from around 500 websites can be searched by
subject category.
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/
The British Library is also working with other partners of the International Internet Preservation Consortium on a future Curator Tool, which will support web archivists in the full range of the processes they need to manage, and on a Smart Crawler, which will automate the process of locating and gathering related material by following links within and across websites.
The British Library’s perception of the challenges posed
to a ‘traditional’ library in the 21st century are
fully covered in "Redefining the Library - The British Library's
strategy 2005-2008", published in June 2005.
http://www.bl.uk/about/strategy.html
British Library strategy
Papers on Digital Preservation
Specific project documentation
Digital Object Management Programme