MASS DIGITIZATION OF WRITTEN AND DOCUMENTARY HERITAGE, DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND A NEW PARADIGM OF HISTORICAL LIBRARINSHIP

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MASS DIGITIZATION OF WRITTEN AND DOCUMENTARY
HERITAGE, DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND A NEW PARADIGM
OF HISTORICAL LIBRARINSHIP

• Zdenek Uhlír
• National Library of the Czech Republic
• Budapest 11.09.2012

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WRITTEN AND DOCUMENTARY HERITAGE

• historical collections of various type scrolls,
  manuscript codices nd sheets, printed books,
  Einblätter, charters, private and public records,
  letters, etc.
• dead vs. live culture
• border 1800, 1830,1860 1st half of the 19th
  century

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DIGITIZATION is not only making images

• virtual books compound digital documents
• images
• descriptive, structural, technical metadata
• full texts
• audio ...
• virtual environment
• aggregation of resources
• integration of services
• digital tools for further/special/scholarly
  processing
• personalization

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MASS DIGITIZATION

• overlapping critical mass of material
• activities
• private
• open Google
• closed ProQuest
• public
• national e-codices
• international Manuscriptorium, The CERL Portal
• transnational Europeana
• media conversion paradigm shift

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DIGITAL HUMANITIES - conditions

• digital environment
• open vs. free access
• aggregated resources
• integrated services
• search and heuristic tools
• scholarly tools
• e-publishing vs. network publishing

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DIGITAL HUMANITIES - methodologies

• heuristic
• individual phenomena
• mass phenomena
• quantification
• regularities laws
• irregularities changes
• comparison
• culturomic words
• historic motifs/episodes
• vectoral strings
• edition
• pragmatic
• critical
• contextual

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HISTORICAL LIBRARIANSHIP - challenges

• why using even visiting libraries if
• primary documents (written and documentary
  heritage) are availble in the Internet?
• secondary documents (annotations, commentaries,
  scholarly papers) are availble in the Internet?
• tertiary documents (catalogue records) are
  availble in the Internet?

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HISTORICAL LIBRARIANSHIP solution

• new presentation of primary, secondary, and
  tertiary documents to end users
• direct not through metadata mediated view of
  primary, i.e. original documents means direct not
  through metadata mediated search
• mass accessibility of primary, i.e. original
  documents on-line means semi/automatic creation
  of transcriptions and editions on-line
• accessibility of all types of documents on-line
  means semi/automatic creation of annotations,
  commentaries and papers on-line

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HISTORICAL LIBRARIANSHIP first step

• creating
• analytical content descriptions instead of
  bibliological/codicological in-depth descriptions
• trustworthy transcriptions/pragmatic editions
  and layer-editions as a base for contextul
  editions
• analytical illumination descriptions and
  combining them with automatic metadata creation
  concerning image content
• material evidence (origin, binding, provenance,
  etc.) of physical units and relating it the
  textual works

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CONCLUSION

• libraries must bring an added value for their
  end users, i.e.
• aggregate resources of specific area
• integrate services of specific kind
• prepare metainformation of specific type
• personalize environment for specific purpose
• ensure open access for specific material
• create virtual environment for specific
  intellectual approach

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THANK YOU

• ???
• Zdenek Uhlír
• Zdenek.Uhlir_at_nkp.cz