Digital libraries bridge the Atlantic
The hand-written annotations Charles Darwin made on 700 of the books in his personal library were painstakingly transcribed in the 1980s.
Now, thanks to high-resolution digital imagery and an international partnership between Cambridge University Library, Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Natural History Museum in London and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (a collective of ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions in the US and UK), Darwin’s marginalia will be digitally married to the texts they illuminate, allowing scholars to learn his thoughts on a wide range of topics.
The project is supported by the Jisc/NEH Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration grant programme offered by the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) and Jisc.
The grant programme funds collaborative projects undertaken by scholars from the U.S. and U.K. who are working to develop new digitisation projects and pilot projects, add important materials to existing digitisation projects, or develop infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing).
Jisc programme manager Alastair Dunning said: "The first phase of Jisc / NEH projects is generating substantial benefits for research communities on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in terms of the resources created but also in the skills shared between the communities. The second phase will build on this, giving further evidence of the advantages to be gained through international collaboration."
Last year, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that British and American universities should cooperate ‘at a far higher level’ than they currently do. The development of digital tools has made cultural materials globally accessible, making scholarship a worldwide enterprise
"The development of digital tools has made cultural materials globally accessible, making scholarship a worldwide enterprise," said NEH Chairman Jim Leach. "Recognizing these new technologies, we at NEH are committed to facilitating international scholarly collaborations."
Additionally, other grants recently awarded through the Jisc/NEH programme will allow researchers to have access to archaeology collections previously separated by the Atlantic and a shared online reading room for Islamic manuscripts.
Awards for the projects range from approximately £135,000 to £200,000 ($200,000 to $300,000) for a period of eighteen months starting September 2009. Details about the other projects are below:
The University of York and Arizona State University are bringing together two large digital libraries related to archaeology so that both libraries can be searched simultaneously. A web services application will be developed to allow researchers to cross-search metadata records held by Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the U.K. and The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) in the U.S., covering the archaeology of England and the United States.
In a second stage, a richer and deeper cross-search web facility will be developed for databases recording animal remains in England and the United States, providing a valuable research tool for archaeologists in both countries.
The School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London is working with Yale University to bring ancient resources to life through a virtual reading room for Islamic manuscripts; these will include Arabic and Persian manuscripts by Arab philosophers, physicians and scientists alongside relevant reference materials. The project will build a suite of tools that will analyse the digitised manuscripts and cross-reference them with supplementary materials, an infrastructure which will serve as a model for other special collections and libraries rich in manuscripts and related reference materials.
Images reproduced with permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. The photographs show books from Darwin's library that he carried with him on the Beagle Voyage and annotations Darwin made in his copy of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (5th edition, 1837).
More information on the National Endowment for the Humanities
Find out more about the collaboration between Jisc and the NEH