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

124
While the advanced document-recognition technology used with the Archimedes Palimpsest has been
discussed previously, the metadata and l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g strategies used to l<strong>in</strong>k manuscript metadata, images,
and transcriptions that were developed merit some further discussion. Two recent articles by Doug
Emery and Michael B. Toth (Emery and Toth 2009, Toth and Emery 2008) have described this process
<strong>in</strong> detail. The creation of the Archimedes Palimpsest Digital product, which released one terabyte of
<strong>in</strong>tegrated image and transcription data, required the spatial l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g of registered images for each leaf
“to diplomatic transcriptions that scholars <strong>in</strong>itially created <strong>in</strong> various nonstandard formats, with
associated standardized metadata” (Emery and Toth 2009). The transcription encod<strong>in</strong>g built off of
previous work conducted by the HMT project, and Emery and Toth noted that standardized metadata
were critical for three purposes: “(1) access to and <strong>in</strong>tegration of images for digital process<strong>in</strong>g and
enhancement, (2) management of transcriptions from those images, and (3) l<strong>in</strong>kage of the images with
the transcriptions.”
The authors also described how the great discipl<strong>in</strong>ary variety of scholars work<strong>in</strong>g on the palimpsest,
from students of Ancient Greek to those explor<strong>in</strong>g the history of science, necessitated the ability to
capture data from a range of scholars <strong>in</strong> a standard digital format. This necessity led to a “Transcription
Integration Plan” that <strong>in</strong>corporated Unicode, Dubl<strong>in</strong> Core, and the TEI. They expla<strong>in</strong>ed that they chose
Dubl<strong>in</strong> Core as their major <strong>in</strong>tegration standard for digital images and transcriptions because it would
allow for “host<strong>in</strong>g and <strong>in</strong>tegration of this data set and other cultural works across service providers,
libraries and cultural <strong>in</strong>stitutions” (Toth and Emery 2008). While they used the “Identification,” “Data
Type,” and “Data Content” elements from the Dubl<strong>in</strong> Core element set, they also needed to extend this
standard with elements such as “Spatial Data Reference” drawn from the Federal Geographic Data
Committee Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata.
Emery and Toth (2009) argued that one of the guid<strong>in</strong>g pr<strong>in</strong>ciples both beh<strong>in</strong>d their choice of common
standards and emphasis on the importance of <strong>in</strong>tegrat<strong>in</strong>g data and metadata was the need to create a
digital archive for both today and the distant future. The data set they created thus also follows the
pr<strong>in</strong>ciples of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) 396 In their data set, every image bears all
relevant metadata <strong>in</strong> its header, and each image file or folio directory serves as a self-conta<strong>in</strong>ed
preservation unit that <strong>in</strong>cludes all the images of a given folio side, XMP metadata files, checksum data
and the spatially mapped TEI-XML transcriptions. In addition, the project developed its own
Archimedes Palimpsest Metadata Standard that “provides a metadata structure specifically geared to
relat<strong>in</strong>g all images of a folio side <strong>in</strong> a s<strong>in</strong>gle multi- or hyper-spectral data “cube””
(Emery and Toth 2009). Because each image has its own embedded metadata, the images can either
stand alone or be related to other members of the same cube. F<strong>in</strong>ally, more than 140 of the 180 folio
sides <strong>in</strong>clude a transcription, and the l<strong>in</strong>es <strong>in</strong> these transcriptions are mapped to rectangular regions <strong>in</strong>
the folio images us<strong>in</strong>g the TEI element. This mapp<strong>in</strong>g serves two useful purposes: it
allows the digital transcriptions to provide “mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable content” and allows easy movement
between the transcription and the image.
In addition to the challenges presented by <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscripts, other digital projects have explored
the challenges of manag<strong>in</strong>g multiple manuscripts of the same text. The Roman de La Rose 397 Digital
Library (RRDL), a jo<strong>in</strong>t project of the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopk<strong>in</strong>s University and the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), seeks to ultimately provide access to digital surrogates of all
of the manuscripts (more than 300) conta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the Roman de la Rose poem. The creation of this digital
396 For more on this ISO standard, see http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf
397 http://romandelarose.org/ - home