Projects
By Nuala Bennett
This month, we are featuring the project “Digital
Emblematica”. Since the 1940’s the Library
has amassed a collection of over 600 emblem books written from 1540-1800,
published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England. While there
are other emblem book collections in Scotland and Germany that exceed
the size of the Illinois collection, no American Library has such
extensive holdings as the University of Illinois.
What is an emblem book?
Emblem books might be looked upon as the multi-medial publications
of the 17th and 18th centuries. They are books that link together
three constitutive elements – a motto, a woodcut or engraving
and an explanatory poem. A single book may have any number of emblems,
ranging from just ten to almost 1,500. In an emblem, the interplay
between text and image produces a greater meaning than any of the
individual components can provide. Emblems were often thought to
be hieroglyphs, riddles or even mysterious messages containing secrets.
Their interpretation and understanding relied on the wit, knowledge
and ability of the reader to combine clues in the text and image
to produce meaning. During the time of their original use, they
were read and viewed widely by both the educated and uneducated
classes of European society. Today, research in emblems is highly
interdisciplinary, attracting scholars of Latin, history, art history,
and the European vernacular languages. They often also appeal to
religious scholars, philosophers, and historians of science and
education.
Digitizing the emblem collection
In 1998 the Library began to collaborate with Prof. Mara Wade of
the German Department, with the objective of using digitization
to make it possible for an increasing number of faculty and students
who needed access to study and teach with these materials in a more
flexible format than the physical books would allow. Many emblem
books are small in physical size, and it is very difficult without
the aid of a magnifying glass to decipher the intricate detail of
an emblem engraving, and the corresponding mottos, many of which
are written in Frakturschrift. A first pilot project explored the
use of flatbed as well as digital camera for image capture, and
began to work on a set of metadata elements. A second pilot project,
funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research in 2001,
supported the digitization of more books and the further development
of a metadata schema. Additional support for collaboration with
the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel in Germany
was received from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and support
for the high-resolution monitors and workstations was received from
IBM. One of these workstations is now in the Rare Book and Special
Collections Library. With the most recent funding, we have been
able to digitize a further dozen books this past year. They are
now all online from the project web site, http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems.
Workshop report
Beth Sandore, Tom Kilton, Mara Wade and Nuala Koetter have just
returned from a very productive week in Wolfenbüttel. This
trip, supported through the grant from the von Humboldt Foundation,
allowed us first to spend several days talking with HAB colleagues
about the sharing of our emblem metadata. We were then joined by
colleagues from Scottish, Dutch and German libraries to talk about
emblem digitization in general. Each attendee gave a short 20-minute
presentation which was followed by a very productive discussion
on the topic.
Mara started the session with a presentation on portals, which
led to a very interesting discussion on the need for a portal in
the emblem community. By the end of the meeting, it was agreed that
the University of Illinois Library would be the correct venue to
host such a portal and now Nuala is working with a graduate assistant
to develop a portal for the emblem community. Beth gave a presentation
on applying standards to our best advantage and she also spoke about
collection-level repositories. This was the first time the emblem
group had talked together about the possibility of developing such
a repository and while they did not agree to definitely start working
on it now, the potential for the repository was very well received.
Tom’s presentation was on the user’s perspective on
emblem digitization and he gave a wonderful session analyzing web
sites that already exist with digitized emblem materials. On the
last day, Nuala spoke about the possibilities of exporting emblem
metadata while using a proprietary software package (CONTENTdm)
and the sharing of metadata through the OAI metadata harvesting
protocol. A more complete report on the workshop will soon be available
in the newsletter of the Society for Emblem Studies.
In the meantime, the week has led to some useful decisions. UIUC
will host an emblem portal, the emblem community is close to realizing
the first draft of a new metadata schema for emblem books which
will soon be publicly available and finally, a new group, OpenEmblem,
was formed to work on emblem digitization together. (You heard it
here first!)
We invite everyone to browse the Library’s digitized emblem
collection (http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems)
and if you have any questions, please email Nuala (nabennet@uiuc.edu).
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