Father Najeeb Michaeel examines a manuscript

Father Najeeb Michaeel is an Iraqi Christian priest who speaks Arabic, English, French, Aramaic and Syriac, not to mention being able to read Latin and Greek. In the garden of Zaytun library, Erbil I hear this gentle man tell me how his community of friars used to live in Mosul, a traditional centre for Christianity in Iraq, having the highest proportion of Assyrian Christians of all the Iraqi cities. Father Najeeb’s community has  had to leave Mosul due to persecution.  Later on during The House of Books workshop he gives us a presentation of the magnificent early Christian manuscripts they are digitising.  Over coffee he gives us a moving rendition of the ‘Our Father’ sung in Aramaic.  I wasn’t expecting to feel so moved by a  religion I have become increasingly frustrated by, and in Iraq.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Iraq has often compared to a mosaic in terms of the diversity of its religious diversity.  Iraq is a Shia majority country and contains the sacred Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala. Most sources estimate that around 65% of Iraqis follow Shia Islam, and around 35% follow Sunni Islam. What is not so well known is that Christians have inhabited what is modern day Iraq for about 2,000 years. The person who is supposed to be respnsible for the transmission of Christianity in Iraq is St Thomas the Apostle. Assyrians (also called Syriacs and Chaldeans) most of whom are adherents of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East account for most of Iraq’s Christian population, along with Armenians.  Tariq Aziz was born to an Assyrian family and is a member of the Chaldean Catholic church. There are also small populations of Mandaeans, Shabaks, Yarsan and Yezidis. The Iraqi Jewish community, numbering around 150,000 in 1941, almost entirely left the country. There are also Gnostics in the form of Mandeans and sub sects thereof, Yazidis who believe in a god but have a blue peacock angel in their pantheon, and of course the Zoroastrians which the ancient Babylonians followed.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Despite this diversity they share some things, one being religious persecution within Iraq.  Estimates for the numbers of Christians suggest a decline from 8–10% in the mid-20th century to 5% at the turn of the century, to 3% in 2008.  About 600,000 Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria, Jordan or other countries or relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan.which is also the traditional homeland of the Assyrian people. Those who remain are very aware of their minority status and the threat to their lives. Another shared thing they have in common is a respect for their heritage, both in terms of artefacts and records.  In the aftermath of the war in Iraq where countless manuscripts where destroyed, these communities are well aware of the importance of their documentary heritage. Each group have their own manuscript collection. In addition, an attempt by Saddam Hussein to centralise private collections of archives has also made them wary of any notion of centralisation/government control. This has resulted in many collections being hidden away and lost.

 It was in this context that I met Father Najeeb in Erbil. He was there to speak about his work at the Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux (CNMO) Mosul  and their work involving the digitisation of their  Iraqi Christian manuscripts. This is a small scale project conducted by the Dominican community in Kurdistan. Their move to Iraqi Kurdistan was due to their persecution in Mosul and the government in Kurdistan ensures as much they can the community’s safety.  Father Najeeb and his community are being helped by Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk in St John’s monastery in Minnesota. Based at the the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, the library began in the cold war, hoping to retain a record of Europe’s heritage in case the Soviets came.  Father Stewart’s  goal since 2003 has been to  digitise as many Eastern Christian manuscripts in the Middle East as possible, because  these manuscripts are endangered from a variety of causes. The main danger is the ethnic genocide which has afflicted Iraq but also neglect.

CD of a collection for donor

Father Najeeb’s aim is clear, to preserve and generate awareness and interest in these ancient Iraqi Christian manuscripts and protect their heritage from disaster and cultural genocide. The Centre actively collects and digitises collections from private donors, who in turn get a copy of their manuscripts on CD (see above). I met other members of the Christian community in Iraq who had found a safe haven in Ankawa a district of Erbil which we visited. They all speak several languages including Arabic and Syriac, an ancient language closely related to Aramaic.  While Erbil is known as a safe haven withing Iraq, driving around in Father Najeeb’s car  one realises that hanging a rosary bead from a rear view mirror is not a casual gesture a brave declaration of faith as is wearing the traditional clothes of a Catholic priest.

The manuscripts which Father Najeeb is digitising are extarordinarily beautiful, and all the more so considering their provenance, age and the number of destructive forces they have endured. They have of some similarity to other e arly Christian manuscripts of the age, as the religion spread as far east as Iraq and also to the wilds of western Ireland where scribes worked on  similar texts.  In some way digitisation and the digital age has brought people together again  to protect these texts and hopefully raise awareness of this and other vulnerable communities.

Young Iraqi Christian at Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux

Flying into Erbil at night

“What you destroy, we will rebuild, only better” – Slogan of Kurdish Peshmerga.

The garden I am standing in is so beautiful that I find it difficult to imagine that it was a former detention centre  operated by Saddam Hussain’s Ba’ath party, a place  of imprisonment and torture.  It is now a garden full of  flowers  and trees and in its centre rises the impressive Zaytun Library of Erbil.  This is no accident, the Kurdish Peshmerga vowed that all these sites would be rebuilt this way once Saddam’s regime ended and the people would reclaim such poisoned land for purposes such as libraries and gardens. Erbil or or Hawler as it is called by locals like much of Iraq has seen a lot of history pass its way, Alexander the Great sorted out the Persian King Darius near here and the citadel of Erbil is the oldest inhabited city in the world and a soon to be UNESCO heritage site.

Erbil citadel

But let’s take a step back. What is a London based Corkonian doing in the middle of former detention centre/ garden in Iraqi Kurdistan? This  region in the north is the ancestral homelands of the Kurds – the oft persecuted minority in Iraq.  The Kurds constitute the largest minority without a homeland. I was at the library as part of the third House of Books workshop funded by the EU and UNESCO and run by a Humanitarian NGO called Un Ponte Per…. You can read more about their involvement here. It is the last in a series of workshops which has been looking at digitisation of texts and their preservation and its main partner is the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). Many institutes from Iraq joined us including the National Museum of Iraq, Centre Numérique des Manuscrits Orientaux and other projects. From the Middle East the  National Library of Jordan and the  American University of Beirut also took part. My story with the INLA goes back to 2004 when I managed after some effort to persuade Dr Saad Eskander to write his  diary about his day to day life reconstructing the destroyed library in Baghdad.

Iraq National Library and Archives

The INLA was destroyed during and post war in 2003.  Of its 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts, an estimated 60 percent of its total archival materials, 25 percent of its books, newspapers, rare books, and most of its historical photographs and maps were destroyed in various ways. This was not just a loss for Iraq, it was a catastrophe for the world on many levels.

In 2011, Dr Eskander has built up a library few could ever have imagined possible. The INLA now leads the way in much best practise in librarianship for both traditional and digital material in Iraq.  There are also many digitisation projects being hatched in Iraq and around the Middle East, big and small and the drive to join up previously physically separated collections of journals, manuscripts, photographs is strong. The potential of the digital has long been recognised as a powerful means of disseminating information in the Middle East. The workshop  is trying to make projects understand that digitisation has a catch, and that is preservation or how to ensure that access is maintained over time. This idea was well introduced in Jordan during sessions such as ”Digitisation is not preservation’ and other catchy titles, and the event this time saw progression and developments since Jordan. In fact it seemed that projects had reassessed their approach to digitisation. Some would admit that where previously they were just scanning, (blogs passim) they revisited their projects in light of what they had learned in Jordan. Some  added technical metadata which they had not done at point of digitisation, others looked at having master copies as well as access copies of their digitised content and kept in different locations.  Policies were reconsidered. Storage solutions were considered. All steps in the right direction. The value of having 2 workshops in a year with a lot of the same people in both proved useful  as there seemed to be a lot of consolidation and desire to demonstrate improvements between one meeting and the next.

Workshop overview

The workshop was kicked off by UPP, and some short contributions by the EU’s representative in Kurdistan, Hala Al Sharifa , followed by the UNESCO programme officer for Kurdistan, Sami Al Khoji who is clearly dedicated to his role and the revitalisation and distribution by digital means of information about Iraq’s cultural assets. Kanan Mufti who is  director general for antiquities in the western Kurdish region in Erbil and who resided in the ancient citadel reflected on the importance of documentary heritage for Kurdistan and declared the protection of documents as a priority for them.  Presentations the INLA showed us they have been digitising and accessioning digital content since 2008 and we heard about their  plan to develop an Iraq digital library making its materials available to all Iraqis online.  The material will cover all aspects of Iraqi life and society and all forms of document. The INLA sees as vital its contribution to intellectual and scientific research in Iraq and also endeavours to support programmes which will end illiteracy in Iraq. The INLA has embarked on training programmes in many aspects of digital library management. They have even managed to send 2 people to attend the Digital Preservation Training Programme, thanks to the British Council and BISI.

The National Library of Jordan spoke about the need for standardisation in the region in relation to cataloguing and indexing. The  American University of Beirut ‘s presentation lead on nicely as Basma Chebani reflected  on Arabic ontologies and the need for authority files in the Arabic speaking world. My 2nd session on metadata fitted in well here and we did a nice hands on exercise, working with the group of 30 through Arabic and Kurdish, it seemed to hit the mark and the right level. The translator also did a great job helping me, he is now a metadata expert!

Father Najeeb of the Dominican Order in Iraq who spoke movingly about their ancient texts and manuscripts and their ongoing digitisation. A small project with great ambitions from a community constantly under threat. I plan to write more about this in another blog.

Early Christian manuscript, Centre Numerique des Manuscrits Orientaux, Mosul, Iraq.

Many copyright issues arose, in particular that of forgeries in the traditional manuscript environment. It seems that a lot of illegal copying takes place and it is difficult to contain. Issues such as translation were interesting. During my session on digitisation and preservation the Iraqi born but Aberystwyth-reared translator ran out of his booth proclaiming, ‘What is a plug in?!’ To which everyone loudly  had an opinion in return.

Translator in action

The translator explains metadata

I led the concluding session, working with the group about recommendations for next steps arising from the workshop. This proved interesting, considering I was again working with a translator with a group who spoke Kurdish, Arabic and Syriac, not to mention an Arabic English keyboard! Getting individuals to think by themselves and for themselves about what they would accomplish on their return to work is good in a big group. They then worked as teams of 4 to consider what the next steps would be in Iraq for libraries and archives.  The key issues were networking, the establishment of a national network or syndicate of librarians and archivists and information specialists involved in libraries and archives is deemed of great importance. The group also want to consolidate the information from the workshops and ensure that people are not reinventing the wheel in terms of developing best practise. The establishment of education and training programmes in all aspects of librarianship and archives is also vital.

Metadata matters but other things do too.

What was also key and hidden beneath the discussion of texts and metadata and the like was that this was a   moment or space away from the day to day. These people work in circumstances which we cannot begin to comprehend. Just to come to the workshop involved endless checkpoints and danger. Life is unsafe and violent. Civil society as we know it here in the UK is almost non existent in most of Iraq. Electricity cuts are regular, resulting in me being stuck in a lift fo 5 minutes. This is not the same for Erbil on the whole but most colleagues came from Baghdad, Mosul and other regions which are the news for tragic reasons.

The value of this little group of archivists and librarians from different ethnic and religious groups is more than just about metadata and file formats (as important as they are) but about bringing disparate groups of people together with a view to the flowering of a new nation where religious and ethnic difference no longer matter, where censorship doesn;t exist, where ideas flow freely once again. This is the vision of the INLA director Dr Saad Eskander.  It is not an easy vision in a divided society where sectarianism is rife. However it is not so unusual to consider the power of libraries as a social phenomenom and yet we seem to treat them purely as an informational phenomenon. The House of Books demonstrates that it works on at least 2 levels

Iraq as everyone knows has  a violent history of occupation and war, however during periods of serenity, the emergence of civilisations who have made numerous extraordinary contributions to the history of civilisation, these include  writing, and the concept of zero or  sifr to name but a few.  Original texts survive from the era of Babylonian mathematics. On day 1 of archives school baby archivists learn that the Babylonians wrote on tablets of unbaked clay, using cuneiform writing. The symbols were pressed into soft clay tablets with the slanted edge of a stylus and so had a wedge-shaped appearance (and hence the name cuneiform). Experts studying these learned that the Babylonians had developed the concept of sifr or zero.

Cunieform from Babylonian times: Top: 64 (1 sixty + 4 ones) bottom: 3604 (1 sixty2 + 0 sixty + 4 ones)

Sifr is also used in Arabic to denote a clean slate, a blank page. In Iraq hard work has begun of the rebuilding from scratch  of a rich cultural heritage of Iraq for the future.  I am glad that the preservation of digital heritage of Iraq is a part of this.  More later!

If you haven’t seen it, can I recommend Kristen Snawder’s recent post on the Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, Digitization is different than digital preservation. Kristen reiterates familiar points about the long-term commitment necessary for serious digital preservation, contrasted with the quick hit of a scanning project. “In the hurry to meet user expectations, institutions may scan large quantities of materials without having a solid plan for preserving the digital images into the future.”

However another recent find on the Web compels me to make an additional point, namely that we might do equally well to differentiate between scanning and digitisation. Anyone can set to work with a scanner and create a bunch of digital images – but that barely scratches the surface of what I think we should be expecting of a digitisation project in 2011.

First and foremost, we need metadata: the more the merrier, but something at least. Even if we expect to come back later and polish it up (once the images can be browsed and examined on screen). In the absence of any established metadata profiles for a project, at least try to cover as many Dublin Core elements as possible – title, creator, date, subject/keywords… Images, in particular, may prove tricky or time-consuming to find again, especially once there are thousands of them on a disk. We should probably keep the metadata in a database, and perhaps additionally store metadata with the objects. This can be as XML or plain text files stored alongside the digital images, or embedded in the files we create (many common file formats – TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, PDF – support metadata embedding, and there are many free tools available to help).

There is yet more, though, that we should be doing, particularly when we are scanning text-based objects (articles, books, magazines, reports, etc). Most importantly, we really should try and extract the text from the image if possible. ^[1]

My recent web find was the teaching blog of Dr Toine Bogers at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. One fascinating post describes a Lab Session exercise, From OCR To NER, a set of comparatively simple command-line processes to get the most out of a scanned-text project.

Toine’s post walks us through the process. Once the article is scanned, we should apply some OCR. The exercise goes further and also describes the use of tools to clean up and spell-check the resulting OCR’d text. This will, at the very least, result in a separate text file, hopefully containing a fairly accurate version of the article text. Finally, the cleaned-up text can be submited to a Named Entity Recognition service. Toine’s exercise uses NER tools at University of Illinois. (We’ve been using similar functionality provided by OpenCalais and GATE for our AIM25 Open Metadata project.)

Why do all this? The most important, instant, result of this is that we can now easily index our article for full-text searching – in a local repository system, such as EPrints or DSpace provide – and of course by Google. None of this is possible if we leave the scanned image as just that – an image.

Another  side-effect of any successful OCR outcome, is that the text is now free to be re-flowed. This means that we might consider sharing it with users in a variety of forms enhancing usability and accessibility.

It’s important not to confuse preservation formats with formats for access and dissemination. You probably will have your scanned image masters in TIFF, RAW, JPEG2000, PostScript, SVG. None of these are likely to be of much use to your users over the Web. Not only are the formats not widely supported by Web browsers, but most users probably don’t need or want your master image. If it’s a high-resolution scan of a 100 page book, they might be looking at 100Mb download, or worse – slow to load, and probably slow to render and navigate.

Time taken thinking what formats will give users the best experience is time well spent. What platforms might they want to use now and in the foreseeable future? It’s less than 18 months since Kindle3 made e-book readers affordable, and the Ipad made them sexy. E-books look and function very impressively on both platforms (albeit in different ways): for an overview of some of the benefits of the EPUB format, see Martin Fenner’s post Beyond The PDF… is EPUB. PDF outputs may yet have their uses, if users can at least search for text within them. The point is that only with properly digitised text, do these kinds of accessibility options become possible.

Even image collections can also be disseminated as E-books – nice offline items some users might care to flick through on their tablet computers, possibly even smartphones. I’ve demonstrated how we can create OJS XML from EPrints XML on-the-fly with XSLT: since EPUB and Mobi/Kindle are XML-based formats, we should be able to do something similar to create e-books using repository APIs. Also, by using appropriately sized images in dissemination formats (Ipad screen is 1024x768px; Iphone4 is 960x640px) we can not only ship our users a sensibly-sized download, we can protect any capital we may have in the master images, without having to resort to ugly tricks like watermarking. (Giving users full-size, high-res images with embedded watermarks seems to me the worst of all worlds.)

Therefore I’d suggest that, in order to get the best out of a digitisation project, consider what would you like to see at the end of the project – and, more importantly, what would give your users the best experience, or even win you new users? Ask around, do some tests, with users if possible, and get an idea how they want to use the materials and how they will get the best out of them. Maybe there are comparable projects and systems that you admire, with features you’d like to be available for your collection. What about in five or ten years’ time: will your current project outputs help or hinder longer term accessibility goals?

This kind of vision of is essential. Without some conception of the end result, how the materials will be used and managed most effectively, all the scanning in the world isn’t going to amount to a successful digitisation project.

A glimpse of Petra, Jordan

‘Machine replication of human functions, like reading, is an ancient dream’ *

One of the many topics discussed in the House of Books project in Amman was the issue of OCR and Arabic texts. Optical character recognition or OCR has become one of the most successful applications of technology in the field of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. It is now a necessary step in the transition from analogue text to the elctronic world, particularly due to the quantity of information now available in the electronic age as it enables rapdi searching and scanning. In the last five decades, machine reading of text has grown from a dream to reality.

Software for OCR is now almost 100% sucessful for Roman scripts. Middle Eastern library content however, particularly for Arabic and other non-Roman language materials, poses special challenges to the creation of digital repositories of arabic texts.  Arabic, being a diacritic language has many characters (letters) which have exactly the same form, and are distinguished only by the position of various dots over, above, or inside the main character block. This  poses special difficulty for OCR, as dots can be ignored by software as speckling or error, or even removed. Most institutions digitising Arabic manuscripts use Sakhr OCR software, but it does not seem to pick up the intricacies of Arabic script. What to do?

Some arabic fonts http://university.arabsbook.com/

It seems that if prepared well the Sakhr recognition software package has the capability to recognize generic Arabic fonts (called Naskh or Kūfī) with a fair degree of accuracy. However the software has to be taught to recognize any peculiarities or unusual characteristics in the font of the scanned volume in question. This is extremely time consuming and requires technical expertise. Also it is taken for granted in such a process that the font will be more or less consistent throughout any given volume; in many cases the hand can change in any manuscript so I imagine it would need to be reinstructed according to each section where the hand or the font changes. In addition the quality of any OCR depends on the quality of the original scanned file.  Also not everyone wants to use generic fonts, think of how much we like to personalise our own? Another headache for Sakhr.

Our group in Amman as a whole expressed frustration with  Sakhr and really hoped that it could in some way be generally instructed to recognise characters which it consistently fails to pick up. We felt sure that it will be solved soon and I personally cannot imagine that the military have not got a  solution up their sleeve  about this considering the politics of the world these days.

Interestingly in terms of resources discovery, Google Scholar does not allow searching in Arabic, while it allows for searching of both Japanese and Chinese scholarly texts. Surely as complex for an OCR piece of software to recgnise as Arabic?   This means that any texts written in Arabic cannot be accessed, which means that scholarship in Arabic is not being picked up by one of  the biggest and widest search engines for scholarly literature. Why such an oversight by Google scholar? I have contacted them and have yet to find out!

This of course brought home the real need for more collaboration between libraries and archives involved in digitsiation projects in the Middle East itself. There are many  projects based in North America such as Ameel and in the UK such as SOAS (which our own Repository folk in DART have been working on!) which unify and make available digital resources from the Middle East.  There was also an interesting JISC study with the University of Exeter about user requirements for digitised resources in Islamic studies. These are of course a western approach to arabic material, albeit in their own collections. It often also is concerned with transalations of arabic texts to greek or Latin as was the norm.

The issue of OCR and its sucess rate for non Roman fonts also raises questions about the power of the digital and askes the question that if OCR canot serve one of the great languages – Arabic,  how many minority languages which are also very diacritic are not being served well by the OCR sofwtare available.  The result of this must a tip in the balance of available reserach material in favour of texts in Roman script and sees an imbalance in what is being made available online.

Baghdad at night, 2011

There is a need for the countries which created this material to work together on such projects. Many very interesting and topical projects  to do with the emergence of which were being proposed in Amman relating to digitisation and working together to track missing journals as well as trying to avoid duplicating efforts.

So how to do this? Several libraries attending our workshop in Amman highlighted the necessity to coordinate the effort for  Arabic texts digitization in order to avoid duplication, share best practices and develop common standards, index and software. To enable this  a decision was made to work on  developing new cultural cooperation interventions for digitisation in the Middle East; to fund-raise for this and to set up groups in a social network (facebook, linkedin) including all the participants from the House of Books project. Importantly further workshops will be run to encourage this cooperation and hopefully see strides being made in cooperation and digitisation of arabic texts in the Middle East.

* http://www.nr.no/~eikvil/OCR.pdf

**Thanks to Qaiss Hatef  Saeed of the Iraq National Library and Archives for his help.

Friday’s CeDAAME dissemination event was also an opportunity to be reminded that ULCC’s Digital Archives team has contributed in other ways to the success of SOAS’s team, directly and indirectly. Julie Makinson described how SOAS used the AIDA digital asset assessment toolkit in developing their strategic approach; and many of the SOAS team are alumni of the DPTP: so Ed and Patricia have also had their part to play in supporting SOAS’s digitisation efforts.

The presentations at SOAS were extremely interesting, describing the full range of activities of a multi-faceted digitisation programme, from the development of the strategy (using the aforementioned AIDA) to the many challenges of digitising Islamic manuscripts and related materials.

How, for example, do you reliably OCR pages of centuries-old text with mixtures of Arabic and Latin/English/French? The answer is that sometimes rekeying is unavoidable. We learned, too, that Yale used UKOLN’s DC Dot Dublin Core editor to create their metadata for Islamic collections (and then convert to TEI). Thanks to the native DC and Unicode support in EPrints, SOAS metadata (in English and Arabic) was created and managed directly in the repository. Metadata exchange between Yale’s Fedora-based system and SOAS’s EPrints system seems to have been achieved effectively – I know Rory worked closely with SOAS and Yale on this.

And I sensed genuine excitement in the room when the page-turning interfaces for viewing the books online were unveiled: both very impressive. (For SOAS Rory has been working long and hard on adapting the open source book viewer used by the Internet Archive, and ensuring that the right-to-left reading and page-turning functionality works smoothly.) We also learned about a variety of different approaches to the issues of managing and funding digitisation and cataloguing activities: with my work on the Mediawiki-based Transcribe Bentham project in mind, it was particularly interesting to hear about University of Michigan’s Collaborative Cataloguing initiative.

All in all an exciting day, and particularly satisfying to see close-up the kind of synergies that exist across all of the activities of ULCC’s Digital Archives and Repositories Team. In addition to further enhancing the SOAS Digital Archives system, we are also looking forward to working with them on their JISC-funded Engaging Overseas Communities project, which is going to involve hooking EPrints up to mobile phones in Africa and Asia.

As if that wasn’t enough, at lunchtime I also dashed over to the School of Pharmacy, where Jean, Neroli and Michelle had kindly organised a lunchtime meeting for the University of London repository managers in the LEAP consortium. It was an opportunity for me to unveil a preview of the new SHERPA-LEAP website (with added social networking goodness, courtesy of WordPress/BuddyPress) that we expect to launch very shortly.

It was a nice way to round off a week in which the Team also achieved significant milestones in our work on preservation metadata for the Parliamentary Archives and strategic development for The Women’s Library, began planning for the next DPTP course, and we received news that the FP7 BlogForever project, which will see us collaborating with Warwick, HATII, CERN and others until 2013, has received its final sign-off from the European Commission.

Photo by Chad Miller

On the 5 March I attended the London launch of the rebranding of ‘TASI’ to ‘JISC Digital Media’. Tables were decked with everything from canapés & wine, to a variety of AV and photographic media on display (on separate tables of course!). Although the former ‘TASI’ was always a JISC-funded venture, it’s now more prominently self-evident in its newly rebranded name.

As of August this year, JISC Digital Media will become part of a consortium of JISC advisory services that aim to provide joined-up solutions for clients. Other aligned services include JISC InfoNet, JISC TechDis, JISC Legal Information, Procureweb and JISC Netskills.

JISC Digital Media’s official brief is “to ensure that digital media resources being created, used and managed within the further and higher education community meet the teaching, learning and research needs of individuals and institutions within the UK.” The recently expanded service now also provides expertise in moving images and sound. (In fact, as I blog, a couple of members of our very own Digitisation team are attending their new training course on Audio Production).

Speakers at the launch touched upon some specific aspirations for the Service, and a few points of interest stood out:

• JISC Digital Media are keen for the HE and FE sector to use the JISC Digital Media blog and share expertise across the sector;
• Would like to adopt more web 2.0 technologies, for example, skype-based e-learning that could support some aspects of practical training;
• Their emphasis will be on helping the HE/FE sector to use images for teaching;
• There is a recognised need that more must be done to help the FE sector.

Of course, with any newly rebranded organisation, comes a new-look website http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ Nice bold colours and user friendly too! …So farewell dear ‘TASI’ [now a dirty word that incurs a fine if spoken out-loud by its own staff], and ‘hello’ to the new and improved Advisory Service: ‘JISC Digital Media’.

Last Thursday’s Libraries Of The Future (LOTF) event at Oxford University has been well covered elsewhere, so I’ll just note a few key themes as I inferred them. LOTF is a JISC-sponsored campaign begun last year, and continued by means of online social networking (chez Ning) and a JISCInvolve blog, as well as F2F events like this.

If you’d nodded off for even only a couple of years, LOTF might well seem like the product of some post-information-meltdown future, with live Twitter streams projected behind the speakers, and the occasional glimpse of the parallel Second Life auditorium. All the same, one thing we didn’t see, in Real Life or Second Life, were shelves of books, or any books at all for that matter, apart from the JISC Collections catalogue on the registration desk. (By the way, if anyone knows of any shelf-for-shelf library reconstructions iSL, please send me a link.)

On change: Sarah Thomas astutely observed that change only looks fast if you are standing still: the only way to manage it is to be part of it. She proffered sound advice that the past and future – old ways and new ways – should not be set in opposition: we’ll achieve best results by understanding and integrating the best of traditional and innovative approaches to information management. Chris Batt compared the LOTF meeting with a 15th Century gathering of the Society of Scribes, discussing the emergence of “something big”. On that occasion, the “smart” ones, as Chris observed, bit the bullet and set about designing typefaces or investing in their own presses, leaving the rest to soldier on in an ever more marginalised business. This was a more original historical analogy than the usual hackneyed account of the Alexandrian library, though we didn’t escape the day without at least one mention of that. Peter Murray-Rust (“speaking in HTML, not powerpoint“) also had a compelling message: “If you are not aggessively trying to change the world, you will not end up with the Library of The Future.”

On the book: Sarah pointed out that, while the traditional book may still be alive and kicking, we cannot escape or deny the increasing reliance on digital resources, and a need for more and better digitisation projects and online finding aids. Chris picked up this theme, citing Susan Greenfield’s analysis of the information (r)evolution that is replacing “people of the book” with “screen people”: someone born at the start of the 21st Century may have little if any nostalgia for a paper book. (That said, I’m still inclined to think that the dedicated e-Book readers are a conceptual dead-end, except to the extent that they inform the evolution of laptops and other general purpose mobile devices.) From Santiago de la Mora we learned of the potential of Google Books to bring back to life “in-copyright-out-of-print” books.

On libraries and librarians: One particularly interesting observation was the extent to which digitisation breaks down the traditional boundaries between institutions: for example, by undertaking digitisation, a museum in effect is creating a ‘library’ of its digitised objects. Web technology makes it possible for almost any place to become a library, and it is erroneous to conceive of future libraries in terms of their bricks-and-mortar predecessors; libraries themselves must adapt their physical structures and the services they provide. In HE the library of the future will be at the heart of much greater integration across services, departments and institutions, and the trend towards OA research outputs and shared storage (e.g. UK Research Reserve ) is already clear.

On public knowledge: All the speakers expressed commitment to open public knowledge. Peter Murray-Rust cited endeavours like OpenStreetmap , NCBI PubChem, Sourceforge , inter alia, undermining the proprietary nature of data and information. However small, “each individual can do whatever they like on the web… don’t talk… do it!” Peter also aligned himself against Wikipedia’s detractors, and asked why universities aren’t actively helping Wikipedia. Robert Darnton drew audible gasps when he suggested that the best way to accelerate Open Access was for libraries to cancel their subscriptions to paid-for journals. Mining a similar vein, Chris Batt described the job of the “knowledge” (sic) sector as defining, mediating, managing and leading, in creating the public landscape of a Learning Society. The mission must be to remove all barriers to acccess: a universal right to knowledge and integration of knowledge into everyday life, empowering citizens to want to learn. That should involve the kind of creative approach we see in ventures like LibraryThing, rather than some of the more pedestrian public sector online efforts of the past.

I’d be inclined to echo the views on the CILIP blog, that the need for new information skills and literacy training – both of and by librarians – might have been addressed more directly. The nature of librarians of the future was raised by Chris Batt, and implicit in several comments through the course of the afternoon, but at the end of the day I felt we had dealt with many of the new information paradigms, but much less how “informaticians” are going to share that enormous dynamic richness with new and old generations.

And then it was off to the Bodleian Divinity School for a glass or three of Château JISC…

These were the six remaining items that still required digitisation and generation of suitable access copies, in a larger batch of posters that will be made available through BT Archives’ online catalogue.

“Celebration: Send a greetings telegram” poster, circa 1951 (British Telecommunications Archive reference: PRD 981). Approximate dimensions: 38x25cm.

© 2009 “BT” British Telecommunications plc
All rights reserved.

100% crop showing part of greetings telegram example in the centre

Even though tiny at well under two numerals, this is nevertheless a varied series that encompasses GPO’s wartime propaganda, marketing of the telephone and telegraph services, promotion of the newly built Post Office Tower (now BT Tower) and advertisement of the GPO as an exports driver. Sizes are varied too, ranging from just under A3 to over A1, with one particular specimen measuring in at 146x39cm (approximately).

“GPO helps the export drive” poster, 1948 (BT Archives reference: PRD 514). Approximate dimensions: 71x92cm.

© 2009 “BT” British Telecommunications plc
All rights reserved.

100% extract showing cargo boat in the bottom-left corner

Conscious of the fragility and vulnerability of the posters, BT Archives wanted a conservation-strong workflow that could generate high-resolution facsimiles without eschewing a prerequisite for minimal handling and the use of gentle mechanical intervention. We suggested circumventing the relatively heavy-handed large format scanner approach and recommended employment of overhead capture illumined by cold fluorescent lights and supported by use of conservation-grade resting materials. We also warranted the generation of 16bit RGB colour output and 600 and 300 pixels per inch, respectively for up to and larger than A3 – in the end, we offered 600 and 330ppi, which we identified as suitable resolutions for full retention of information and future re-purposing (i.e. so that diminutive typeset and other facets could be retained in the smaller posters – which were initially printed to be viewed at close distances – and to ensure all crucial information, down to the comparatively small logotypes and text, could be kept in the larger specimens).

“The Observer Corps depends on the telephone”, circa 1943 (BT Archives reference: PRD 268). Approximately 76x51cm.

© 2009 “BT” British Telecommunications plc
All rights reserved.

100% crop showing ‘mirror-effect’ print-through, likely the result of years of folded storage before poster was rehoused in conservation-grade Mylar sleeve at the BT Archives

“Come on the telephone”, circa 1934 (BT Archives reference: PRD 71). Approximately 39x146cm.

© 2009 “BT” British Telecommunications plc
All rights reserved.

For additional information about BT and BT Archives, please visit BT’s general website and BT Archives’ portal.

More about this project and ULCC’s digitisation service can also be found in ULCC’s Digitisation pages.

The JISC Digitisation Programme has made a wide variety of valuable resources digitally accessible, including:

• British Newspapers (1620-1900)
• Newsfilm Online
• First World War Poetry
• Newspaper Cartoons
• Welsh Periodicals
• Pre Raphaelite drawings
• East London Theatre Archive

More information about these, and other projects, is available on the JISC Digitisation web page.

The project will review the preservation plans and processes of the sixteen projects funded under Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme, and identify any medium or long-term access risks to the digitised content. It will also produce recommendations – for individual projects and for JISC as a whole – for processes and strategies to mitigate the risks, and case studies which would be helpful to the broader community.

This is an exciting opportunity for us to apply and extend the experience we have gained working on a range of projects in the field, including the European Visual Archive Market-validation Project (EVAMP) and risk assessments for the recently launched Newsfilm Online project. We will shortly be creating an online home to for the project collaboration and development, and will use DA Blog and the DigiPresSurvey Blog (on JISCInvolve) to keep you updated.

We also heard from Murray Weston of BUFVC, whose self-evident enthusiasm and passion for his subject was clearly key to the project’s success. Murray made a strong case that video content is the poor relation in national collections (I think recorded sound runs it a close second, but they are both worthy of more attention.) Many millions are spent on the copyright libraries and they work as part of a system which allows us to use our local library as a portal to a vast resource of printed publications via inter-library loan. For film and video, by contrast, there is no system of legal deposit for material, hence no guarantee that material will be preserved for the nation. Even for the material that does exist, loan agreements are generally absent, and we must visit places such as the NFTVA to view material.

The collection itself is impressive and we were given a good grasp of the breadth and depth of the material available. But the part of the day that made a lasting impression on me was the presentation from Kevin Burden of the University of Hull. They were funded by JISC in what’s known as an assisted takeup project – one which helps the community to exploit the results of another project, be it software, guidelines or digital resources such as NFO. Their work in developing examples of teaching and learning using the Newsfilm Online archive was inspiring, all the more so because they were doing this before the service was fully populated with material. Kevin’s presentation used clips from workshops in a way which illustrated the very techniques he was promoting, and the matrix of use cases – although still only partially populated – is a simple and effective tool which will help others to make use of this resource. I understand that JISC are interested in using this model for other collections, and this can only be a good thing.

And finally… The memory that many may take away is not only of the wealth of material, but of the impact it will have on Malcolm Read, who confessed at the opening to not having owned or watched a television ‘since Bamber Gascoigne looked young.‘ Scholars have generally dated this period to the early 1970s.

This 1st example of a hand-coloured slide depicts the Tudor Kelmscott Manor, “The Country Home of William Morris”, and surrounding scenery. (Click on images to enlarge in a new page and click the back button to return to the post)

Of notice are the rudimentary nature of the colouring work and the 2 occurrences highlighted in pink (enlarged below).

The section on the left is enlarged here to show how some, perhaps fortuitous, cyan tints seem to have undergone change, probably bubbling and eating the emulsion or causing it to dissolve.

The section on the right shows an area blobbed in orange tint that looks to have been dropped and/or smeared by mistake.

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This 2nd slide seems to have been created, or should we say drawn, by direct application of black ink to one of the glass layers, eschewing employment of photographic processes. Although stylistically quite of its time, it nonetheless harks back to an age when photography had yet not risen and lantern slides were created by direct application of sketching and painting techniques to one of the glass layers in the sandwich.

Enlargement of the eye area shows how expansion and contraction (conceivably due to heat generated by the lantern projector) has caused the ink to crack, resulting in an intense fracture pattern that is made evident by the high capture resolution.

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A bird’s eye view of Corfe Castle Village, revealing the architectural and landscaping backdrop to some everyday hubbub in pastoral terra firma.

And a partial enlargement of the lawn or pasture highlighted in pink, revealing what look to be picnickers eating out on the grass (the relatively etched shadows and airy clothing, substantiating the proposition of mild and sunny days long ahead of climate change).

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Finally, an example of how supplementary visual metadata was captured by reflective scanning of the tape surround and labelled areas (we decided to provide separate archival tiffs for translucent and opaque capture, but the 2 could easily be merged to provide a single visual reference in the sphere of access JPEGs).

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It’s been a pleasurable journey. I feel privileged to have had the chance to work with the William Morris Society and contributed to the preservation of this important collection.

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For more information about the life and work of William Morris, and for research enquiries regarding the William Morris Archive, please visit The William Morris Society Web Site.

Additional case study information about the project, including a testimonial from the William Morris Society, can be viewed on the ULCC website in the William Morris Case Study section.

The Maypole Dairy Cheese box: The box pictured here (in which the lantern slides were originally stored since the late 19th century) is an historical artefact in itself that will be preserved as part of the William Morris Archive. George Watson opened the first shop of the Maypole Dairy Company in 1887 at 67 Queen Street Wolverhampton. I presume this wasn’t too far from Wightwick Manor (a house that was begun in 1887 and which is filled with the work of William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites and William de Morgan). There is a brief history of the Maypole Dairy Ltd. Company at the Wolverhampton History & Heritage Society website.

Dating the slides: In one of the William Morris lantern slide images we spotted an electrical street lamp! This may be our first clue to dating the collection more precisely (c.1890s to 1920s – there’s one slide that’s clearly labelled 1921). Other factors lend to dating the collection around this period, e.g. the variety of themes and an emphasis on ‘street photography’ or exterior views; the lower resolving power and the amateurish character of the image quality all seem to point to a ‘dry plate’ process being used to create these particular slides (i.e. dry plate was the latter photographic process used to create a positive on a glass negative, a process by which lantern slides became popularised and amateurs took to the process).

So far, we’ve also discovered that the images depict the same kind of diversity of themes that were prominent throughout William Morris’s own varied personal and professional life – from socialism and writing through to images depicting his designs and personal life.

For research enquiries regarding the William Morris Archive, please contact:

The William Morris Society
Kelmscott House
26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London, UK, W6 9TA
Phone: 020 8741 3735
Fax: 020 8748 5207
Email: william.morris@care4free.net

Website: www.morrissociety.org

Over the coming week we’ll be working with the William Morris Society to digitise their unique collection of lantern slides.

Digitising the slides will finally help to open up their access to a wider audience, who may then be able to help provide important information about the provenance and content of individual slides. It’s suspected that one of the images may even be a unique portrait of William Morris’s daughter, May Morris, and that lantern slide images of the Kelmscott House residence may be the only surviving photographic depiction of the residence; the same residence where Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1890, and where he died on 3 October 1896 (now the present headquarters of the William Morris Society). Other unique items may also surface as a result of digitising this remarkable collection.

The Magic Lantern was the forerunner of the modern slide projector (which, in turn, is now almost obsolete, with the advent of digital projection). Lantern slides were often the standard means of illustrating lectures during the 19th century up to the 1930s. The slides consist of two pieces of glass bound together with gummed paper strips or seals with the photographic emulsion bound to one of the inner glass surfaces and protected on the inside of the sandwich. Lantern slide shows would typically feature famous landmarks, foreign lands and personages. Already, we’ve noticed that the William Morris slide collection does indeed reflect this trend – we’ve spotted an iconic image of Big Ben, depictions of Kelmscott Manor (William Morris’s country house), as well as portraits and images of some of William Morris’s famous wallpaper designs. For more information about Lantern Slides see www.magiclantern.org.uk.

The slides were originally kept in a wooden box, seemingly adapted from cheddar cheese packaging (i.e. from the sizes of the labelling fitting the box as it stands, it seems that these were the original ‘Maypole’ cheddar box dimensions); an artefact in itself that will be preserved as part of the William Morris Archive. Prior to digitisation however, we’ll be rehousing the items in unbuffered four-flap negative enclosures and within acid-free and lignin free unbuffered lantern slides boxes, and cushioned by archival polyethylene foam to boot! – naturally the optimum protection to ensure their long-term preservation.

To ensure their long-term digital preservation: high resolution TIFFs will be generated that closely replicate the original images, i.e. archival ‘forensic’ copies if you like, which seek to capture everything including any blemishes, changes to chemical structure, fading and evidence of the original photographic processes used in creating the lantern slides. JPEGs will be produced to enable the Society to then use these images for publishing on the web as well as for educational or publicity purposes.

We’ll keep you posted about the final project outputs and any other interesting discoveries as we’ll eventually be providing a detailed online case study of the project via the ULCC website. The digitisation of the lantern slides should be completed by early next week, and it’s expected that the digital outputs will provide a fascinating insight into the life and times of William Morris.

For research enquiries regarding the William Morris Archive, please contact:

The William Morris Society
Kelmscott House
26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London, UK, W6 9TA
Phone: 020 8741 3735
Fax: 020 8748 5207
Email: william.morris@care4free.net

Website: www.morrissociety.org