Last autumn, BDLSS collaborated with Hertford College to digitize its copies of Abraham Ortelius’s 1573 Theatrum orbis terrarum and Georg Braun’s 1574 Civitates orbis terrarum, two landmark works in the history of cartography, known collectively as the Hertford Atlas. The digitization was undertaken as a celebration of the return of the atlas to Humboldt University in Berlin, whence it came at the end of the Second World War. The digitized atlas is now in Digital.Bodleian, with a IIIF manifest and image endpoints to enable creative and scholarly engagement with this resource.

To mark the anniversary of Abraham Ortelius’s death in 1598, we published a series of tweets on Tuesday encouraging Twitter users to engage with the digitized atlas. You can read them all on Storify.

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and to celebrate the opening of the Bodleian Libraries’ “Shakespeare’s Dead” exhibit, we have added our copy of the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and created a IIIF manifest that allows the full structure of the book to be displayed in Digirati’s Universal Viewer.

The Bodleian’s First Folio has an unusual history: it was acquired by the Bodleian when it was printed in 1623, then sold off a few decades later, then rediscovered and repurchased for the Bodleian through a crowdfunding campaign in the early 1900s. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, another public campaign in 2012 raised funds for the Bodleian to stabilize and digitize the First Folio and, later, to create full-text TEI transcriptions of each play. The images and transcriptions can be viewed and downloaded from the First Folio project website. Now, by adding the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and creating images and metadata that are compatible with the standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework, we are opening up this resource for further use by institutions and researchers across the world.

Creating the IIIF First Folio was a multi-step process. Adding the images and metadata to Digital.Bodleian allowed us to generate a bare-bones IIIF manifest, which included page-level metadata but did not reflect the structure of the plays. To allow users to navigate through the book’s contents, we then hand-edited the manifest to add nested ranges of images corresponding to each play and scene. The finished manifest is almost 30,000 lines long.

Digital.Bodleian’s embedded image viewer doesn’t support image ranges, so instead, we’re directing users to the Universal Viewer, a IIIF viewer produced by Digirati, the Wellcome Library, the British Library and the IIIF community. The Universal Viewer—which can be accessed directly from the First Folio in Digital.Bodleian by clicking on the purple “UV” button—features an “Index” panel that displays the multiple levels of structural hierarchy described in the First Folio’s IIIF manifest. The Universal Viewer is also embeddable, so if you like, you can add the First Folio to your own website. You can also link to particular parts of each page, as the URL of each Universal Viewer session is live-updated with the coordinates of the part of the image you are currently viewing. (For example, here is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech.)

Finally, this re-publication of the First Folio includes several previously-unpublished images of the book’s binding. The Bodleian’s copy is rare in that it has not been rebound since its initial printing almost 400 years ago, so these images are especially valuable, conveying a sense of the weight, size and condition of the original object.

– Emma Stanford

Shelley adds. d.14

Yesterday, in a ceremony at the Weston Library, Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden announced the Bodleian’s latest acquisition and its 12 millionth printed book: a formerly lost pamphlet containing a “poetical essay” by an 18-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley (described on the pamphlet’s title page only as “a gentleman of the University of Oxford”). The pamphlet was printed in Oxford in 1811, rediscovered in 2006, and recently donated to the Bodleian by Mr Brian Fenwick-Smith.

The pamphlet has been digitized by the Bodleian and a TEI transcription has been created. You can view the images and transcription, and learn more about the pamphlet, on its brand-new microsite. The pamphlet has also been added to Digital.Bodleian, with IIIF-compatible images and metadata. (It is also now in SOLO, having been catalogued as Shelley adds. d.14.)

As challenging as it has been to digitize such a recent acquisition, which even yesterday was still in the process of being catalogued, we are proud to have been involved in this event, and pleased that this remarkable addition to the Bodleian’s collection is being shared with web users worldwide.