Climbing the Digital Everest:

The Journey to Digitize the

Nineteenth Century

2012 Charleston Conference

• Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing, The National Archives, UK

• Simon Bell, Head of Strategic Partnerships & Licensing, The British Library

• Ray Abruzzi, Director of Strategic Planning, Gale | Cengage Learning

Speakers

Introduction

• Gale’s Approach to “Digitizing the Nineteenth Century”—

• Collections and Content—provide the mountain

• Researchers and Students—provide the reason

• Negotiating the Terrain

• Advisors/Sherpa

• What’s in Gale’s Backpack:

• Technology—Ropes and Crampons

• Partners

• Flags on the Summit

• The View from the British Library

• The View from The National Archives

Discussion Agenda

4

Sizing up the Mountain: how do the centuries compare?

Book publishing

in 18C UK

(ECCO)

Book publishing

in 19C UK (based on NSTC and BL estimates)

1M+ titles ~ 315M pages

185K titles

~ 33M pages

Book publishing

in 18C USA

(Evans) 33,000 titles

~ 2M pages

Book publishing

in 19C USA (est. based on NSTC and S-S)

360K titles ~ 100M pages

As well as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and

other documents…….

• After releasing ECCO many of our customers asked us, “When will you do

the same thing for the 19th century?”

• But what did that really mean?

• The NSTC isn’t comprehensive in the same sense as the ESTC

• Printing (along with literacy rates) exploded during the 19th century

• Beyond the publishing world, shipping, railroads, and other

improvements in transportation and communication created a more inter-

connected world, commercially and politically, but also in an academic

sense

Why NCCO?—”Because it was there…”

6

Twice as many faculty specialize in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth,

indicating a greater need for institutional investment in teaching and research:

19th Century vs. 18th Century Faculty (US)

Category 18th C 19th C 19C/18C Factor

American Studies 1,523 2,393 157%

British Studies 794 2,356 297%

Other Disciplines 351 1,448 413%

TOTAL 2,668 6,197 232%

Source: MDR’s

College Universe

Similarly, there is significantly greater scholarly output on the nineteenth

century than on the eighteenth century :

Scholarly Publishing through 2010: Academic Articles

18th C Articles 19th C Articles 19C/18C Factor

12,564 21,937 167%

Source: Chicago

Journals/JSTOR

More Climbers

User-Driven Product Design-The Climbers

Many paths to

the summit

George Mallory (upper left) and Sherpas on Everest, 1922

Global Advisors--The Guides

• John Merriman, Charles Seymour

Professor of History, Yale

University

• Dr. H.K. Kaul, Director, DELNET,

India (ad hoc role)

• Joris Van Eijnatten, Professor of

Cultural History, Chair of the

section ‘History of Culture,

Mentalities and Ideas since 1500’,

Utrecht University, Department of

History and Art History

• Hilary Fraser, Geoffrey Tillotson

Professor in Nineteenth-Century

Studies, Birkbeck University of

London:

• Dominique Kalifa, Professor at the

University of Paris 1 Pantheon-

Sorbonne, Head of the Doctoral

School of History and Director,

Centre of 19th Century History

• Tatiana Holway, Independent

Scholar, Author, Researcher, and

Editor, specializing in 19th-century

social sciences

• Damon Jaggars, Associate

University Librarian, Columbia

University Libraries

• Jerome McGann, Professor of

English, University of Virginia,

Founder and Director of NINES

Global Advisory Board

• Kathleen Banks Nutter, Archivist,

Smith College

• John Wright, Director, Arts &

Culture, Libraries and Cultural

Resources, University of Calgary

• William Miller, Dean of University

Libraries, Florida Atlantic

University

Global Advisory Board

Edmund Hillary and his guide,

Tenzing Norgay

Science, Technology, and Medicine

• Dan Lewis, Ph.D., Dibner Senior Curator

of the History of Science & Technology,

The Huntington Library, Art Collections

& Botanical Gardens

Europe and Africa: Commerce,

Christianity, Civilization, and

Conquest

• Charlie Reed, History Department,

ECSU

• Richard N. Price, History Department,

Univ of Maryland

Photography: The World through the

Lens

• Professor Elizabeth Edwards, De

Montfort University, Research

Professor in Photographic History and

Director of Photographic History

Research Centre

Women: Transnational Networks

• Kathleen Banks Nutter, Archivist, Smith

College

Subject Matter Experts for NCCO Archives 2013 (5-8)—Local Knowledge

14

Gale’s Backpack

Technology: Vendor relationships, state-of-the-art scanners and OCR

engines, proprietary quality assurance processes, and an Agile

development methodology.

Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale

Expertise

• Working with over 300 libraries and institutions both large and small, Gale has curated and published

over 250 archival products and collections spanning over 900 years of history

Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale

Scale

• Gale has digitized and made searchable/discoverable over 130 million pages of primary

sources, ranging from Medieval manuscripts to the archive of the Financial Times:

Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale

19 19

Head notes contextualize

the collections for

undergraduates and

researchers, providing

information on:

• provenance and

arrangement of the

material;

• the topics and events

which the content

describes; and

• some of the key areas

of research that might

be explored using the

materials

Backpack: Crampons

• Textual Analysis

tools enable

researchers to

discover

connections

between

documents,

events,

movements, and

people.

Backpack: Climbing Ropes

• Named-user

features allow

researchers to

tag and

annotate

content,

guiding

students and

like-minded

researchers to

documents

and building

on collective

knowledge.

Climbing Routes: Tags and Annotations

• Students and

Faculty can create

and share accounts

for class-wide

instruction or for

specific study

groups/projects

• Researchers can

also work together

on joint projects

across locations

Shared Accounts—Never Climb Alone

• British Library

• Library of Congress

• U.S. National Archives

• The National Archives (UK)

• Cornell University Libraries

• Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

• General Commission on Archives and History, United

Methodist Church

• London Metropolitan Archives

• Manchester Statistical Society

• World Microfilms

• Pusey House Library, St. Giles

• Working Class Movement Library

• Canterbury Christ Church University

• Victoria and Albert Museum, London

• Royal Collection, Windsor

• National Portrait Gallery, London

• Huntington Library

• Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester

• National Library of Medicine, NIH, Bethesda, MD

• Library of the Society of Friends

• Divinity School Library, Yale University

• International Museum of Photography

• George Eastman House

• London School of Economics and Political Science

Library

Flags at the Summit--List of current NCCO partners

A View from the Summit—The British Library

Digitising the 19th Century – overview:

• No comprehensive catalogue for the 19th Century, unlike ESTC for early printed material

(up to 18th Century)

• Explosion in publishing output in 19th Century

• Vast holdings of 19th Century material in the BL, but many of them are also held in other

libraries in the UK and in the US

What has already been digitised (e.g. Google Books/Hathi Trust etc.)

What is unique?

What has scholarly/research value?

How can we add value/bring collections together?

Who are the other partners –

what do they have which complements our holdings?

A View from the Peak—The British Library

Digitising the 19th Century – challenges:

• What do we have? Focus on unique material of scholarly value (lots of manuscript

material)

• What metadata is available and to what level of granularity?

• Manuscript material – condition/preservation checking – all material unique, no uniformity

in terms of size, condition etc – a challenge for workflows

• Setting up digitisation studio – conservation training, material handling, throughput

• Managing the workflows – balancing conservation/repair etc with a desire to make material

accessible in the shortest possible timeframe

A View from the Peak—The British Library

NCCO – Benefits for the British Library

• Increased access to collection globally

• Metadata creation for collection – aids discovery

• Conservation and preservation of key British Library manuscripts

• Increased scholarship as cross-searchable with other BL collections as well as those from

other institutions, particularly the National Archive

• New methods of scholarship – value adds of NCCO (e.g. tags and annotations etc.)

• Digital images for the British Library

• Fits the BL’s 2020 Vision

A View from the Peak—The British Library

A View from the Summit—The National Archives

Archival Sources Library Collections

First drafts of history Published, considered analysis

Real-time Hindsight

Mostly manuscript or visual – transcribe Print - OCR

Archives and Libraries in one collection

Both – posters, illustrations,

ephemera

Midget Prince Mignon (Gerrit Keizer) 1891 COPY 1/405/71

32

33

The Rocket Locomotive, 1881 (COPY 1/53/434)

Q&A—and Conversation

Ray Abruzzi, Director, Strategic Planning

Ray.abruzzi@cengage.com

NCCO

http://gdc.gale.com/nineteenth-century-collections-online/

Thank you!