Digital Projects
Early Printing in Europe and Masterpieces of the non-Western Book | The Blockbooks digital collection project site went live in 2010 and displays blockbooks and printed images during the earliest period of printing, the mid-15th century to the 16th century. Additional development is being carried out to improve access to the collection |
The Broadside Ballads Archive Project will create a union catalogue using linked data from Oxford, English Broadside Ballads Archive at University of California Santa Barbara and Vaughn Williams Memorial Library to cluster and enrich English folk song and printed ballad resources at several descriptive and interpretive levels and incorporate image search. | |
The Cultures of Knowledge project released an alpha version of the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) demonstrator site to a select audience. The EMLO site, designed by BDLSS in collaboration with the English and History Faculties, will be the final product of the Cultures of Knowledge project and provide a means of interconnecting interdisciplinary research in seventeenth-century intellectual history. | |
The first stage of development of DataBank, the Bodleian Libraries archival store for research data, is complete. Collaboration with the British Library means that it is now possible to assign DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) to research datasets in DataBank. Development is continuing on this key strategic service. | |
The JISC-funded Dataflow project will be carried out in collaboration with David Shotton and his team in Zoology. It will include the development of virtualized cloud-based research management services building on the BDLSS data repository Databank to serve the 'long tail' of research datasets of small to moderate size. | |
Digital Theses | Thanks to the generosity and vision of Dr Leonard Polonsky, the Bodleian Libraries are able to offer to digitise a number of Oxford D.Phil. theses. The response from authors has been positive: "I would love to have my DPhil thesis digitized" An excellent initiative! I am pleased for the opportunity to have the thesis digitised. The thesis topic remains an active area of interest in discussion and it will be excellent to have broader access of my study. BDLSS staff have been contacting authors to identify theses to be digitised which will be deposited in ORA. |
In the first year, over 7,500 books have been encoded and added to the EEBO-TCP corpus. This represents over 320,000 pages or c.81,000,000 words. There has been a marked increase in usage of this valued resource, partly assisted by the increase in use of the TCP enhanced tables of contents. | |
In collaboration with 25 other research libraries from 11 countries, work has begun to expose our public domain digitised content via Europeana this will include several hundred thousand digital images, and metadata for all the items scanned in collaboration with Google Books. | |
Originally developed as part of the Oxford Cambridge Islamic Manuscripts Catalogue Online, Fihrist became the national union catalogue of Islamic Manuscripts. It now contains the Islamic holdings of seven different UK libraries, including the British Library. | |
The Bodleian Library holds what is still regarded as the best collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world. The Genizah digitisation project in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and the generous contribution of George Blumenthal, will facilitate international research to identify matching fragments in different collections. | |
Phase I of the Google Books project began and software was developed to retrieve and preserve our local copy of the data. Sophisticated scripts were written to produce PDF files from the raw data, and work began to put the delivery infrastructure in place. | |
IMPAcT is a 5-year ERC funded project which will make accessible 13-16th century Islamic intellectual history in collaboration with the Oriental Institute. | |
Maps and Music Catalogues Conversion | The Mellon-funded Music and Maps Catalogues 2-year project will see the conversion of approximately 500,000 catalogue records to form a rich digital collection accessible via SOLO. |
The MLGB3 project was completed successfully in collaboration with the History Faculty and awarded 4 year continuation by Mellon Foundation. The MLGB3 project aims to bring together complementary fragments of the remains of medieval British libraries and catalogues into a central online resource. | |
Revealing Hidden Collections: Tai Buddhist Literature in UK and SE Asian collections | This project will create catalogue records of Shan manuscripts in the Oxford and Cambridge collections using an extensible TEI P5 schema based on that developed for manuscript description for the Fihrist catalogue. More detailed descriptions, transcriptions and digital images will be attached at a later date. |
The Selden Map project begins the process of putting the Selden Map of China, which is held at the Bodleian Library, into a greater cultural and historical perpective. It also describes its restoration. |