JISC

See the collection

The aims of this project were to digitise and make freely available 1500 works, comprising 75,000 pages, from the University of Warwick Library’s Marandet Collection of 18th and early 19th century French playsand to investigate opportunities to improve connections with CESAR (calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’anciem régime et sous la révolution), a service created with AHRC funding that provides 'a comprehensive on-line repository of French theatre resources in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries'.

Executive Summary

The Library had previously digitised nearly 500 of these plays; when the final works from Exposing Marandet are fully processed c.50% of the Marandet Collection’s 4000 plays, completing the period 1700 to 1830, will be openly accessible on the Web, hosted on a dedicated server using OCLC’s CONTENTdm digital collection management software.

The project adopted a combination of in-house and outsourced approaches. Production of digital images and their associated metadata was carried out by BOPCRIS (University of Southampton). Creation of full-text page transcript files was carried out in-house, with the transcript files produced in Unicode to enable full representation of French language diacritical marks. Image files and transcript files were loaded together into CONTENTdm and made freely available. A combination of metadata and transcript content was provided within CONTENTdm to enable full-text searching against the digitised material. Descriptive metadata was contributed to the RLUK databaseCOPAC and OCLC’s WorldCatand collection availability recorded in the OCLC/DLF Registry of Digital MastersProject staff also identified reviews and reports in the CESAR database relating to plays digitised during the project and created additional metadata to connect the two resources.

The project encountered a number of unexpected delays and other factors which together caused a shortfall in the number of complete plays made available by project end (though the remainder of the content will be added over time). These included technical issues, slower than expected transcription throughput owing to low optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy for older material, and digitisation by BOPCRIS of 85,000 pages in total to deliver the 1500 works - 10,000 pages more than expected from our previous digitisation of the plays.

Despite this, the project has largely achieved its aims in that a substantial corpus of content is now openly available to support scholarly and more general interests. The Marandet Collection largely consists of popular drama and vaudeville and so provides a unique perspective on an important period of French history. In addition, links with the CESAR resource have been augmented, and the Library has gained useful understanding of issues around digitisation, including appropriateness of methodologies, understanding of digital production and preservation techniques, and greater experience of OCR.

Conclusions from the project

1. When carrying out a large-scale digitisation project it is important to assess whether the techniques or methodologies adopted for small-scale projects can be effectively up-scaled, as small inefficiencies can become significant issues
2. Careful consideration should be given to the various advantages and disadvantages of in-house and outsourced transcription such as cost, quality control, desired throughput rates, type of content, and so on. Exploring others’ experience is recommended
3. Material with less apparent ‘value’ is worth considering for digitisation and exposure, especially where it forms a coherent body, as users can find characteristics across a collection that generate new and different interest in both that and related content

Report available electronically only