Digital.Bodleian at Alumni Weekend

MS. D'Orville 301, f. 40r

Euclid’s Elementa in Digital.Bodleian

Last weekend the Bodleian invited engineering science alumni attending the University of Oxford’s Alumni Weekend (18-20 September) to a presentation on the Bodleian’s engineering-related materials. This event was held in the Bahari Room and the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Weston Library. While Julie-Anne Lambert of the John Johnson Collection showed our guests a selection of printed ephemera related to automobiles and engineering, I gave a brief tour of the old Toyota Project website (created in 1996 to display images of ephemera digitized with funding from Toyota City) and then gave a demo of our new collections delivery interface, Digital.Bodleian. While the engineers were disappointed that I couldn’t currently show them any editions of Newton or Pythagoras in Digital.Bodleian, they showed interest in the technical aspects and capabilities of the site, especially in the ways in which the IIIF APIs and apps such as Mirador can be used to view and compare items in Digital.Bodleian and other repositories.

– Emma Stanford

Thank you, David Howell!

On 9 June David Howell gave a spell-binding seminar to a packed Centre for DIgital Scholarship: It’s a kind of magic: early results from Analytical Imaging in the Bodleian Libraries.

After a tour through some of the fascinating and high profile conservation projects David has worked on, he turned to a history of analytical imaging techniques, the tricks our eyes use to make sense of the world around us, and, via the mantis shrimp and C5 BCE Persia, to Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and hyperspectral imaging. We were very grateful to colleagues from Special Collections for bringing items from the collections to illustrate David’s talk. Alan Coates, Rare Books Assistant Librarian, brought an incunable (a printed book from the earliest years of print), and Gillian Evison, Head of the Oriental Section, brought some of the oldest items in the Bodleian’s collection, the fifth-century BCE Arshama clay seals.

You can recapture a little of the magic through a Storified version of tweets from the seminar, or through David’s slides, which he’s kindly published through Slideshare: