Database of American Libraries before 1876: The Davies Project, Princeton University, another collaborative research venture
An intriguing Web resource, The Davies Project at Princeton University, was established to conduct “Research into the History of University Libraries in the United States and the History of their Collections.” One of the first fruits of this project is ALB1876: Database of American Libraries before 1876.
What makes this project unusual, and a factor I hope will become commonplace among scholarly enterprises such as this, is the ability of remote researchers to contribute to the end product by collaborating in creating an accurate database record based on digitized source records, in this case, 9,964 “cards complied by Prof. Haynes McMullen, emeritus, University of North Carolina, between 1960 and ca. 1995.” The cards can be viewed in batches of Adobe Acrobat PDF files or as part of each database record as a GIF image. The result of a smple database query for a Library Type = Mechanics’ library is shown below.
Note the two icons in the Extras column: the top one links to the scanned McMullen card, and the bottom one links to a comment form where you can submit information about the data on the card.
Annotating scholarly resources by individuals, whether they’re scholarly experts or not, appears to be taking hold in the United States and Europe. The most recent issue of the DigiCULT Info newsletter (no. 8, August 2004), for example, features an article on a collaborative research tool being developed in France that lets researches add or collection information about digitized historical records, “Making Handwritten Archives Documents Accessible to the Public with a Document Image Analysis System,” and another on the University of Kentucky’s ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in Computing for the Humanities through Collaborative Research, Teaching, and Learning, which is “developing an Edition Production Technology (EPT) for continuing collaboration between computer science and the humanities on image-based electronic editions.”
Source: LibrariansInBlack.net, 2004-09-22 via BeSpacific, 02004-09-21
