Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 617.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 06:59:11 +0100
From: "Al Magary" <al@magary.com>
Subject: Re: 15.614 advice for an online edition, plus another query
I've been working recently with facsimiles online at Penn--a great, growing
collection--and EEBO. One of the great problems of linking text--plain to
highly coded--to images is simple: numbering of images is inevitably
consecutive. For one's own purposes, you have to keep track of things in a
double manner--eg, "p230/rp254," meaning p.230 using the book's page
numbering, running page or image 254 in the facsimile.
Simple problem, no easy solution. EEBO doesn't make it easy to find even a
page whose number you know, even if the book has an adequate (but facsimile,
too) table of contents and/or index. You have to guess at the image
number--easy if you know how many pages of frontmatter there are and the
images are single-page, very difficult if the image is double-page, which is
common in making facsimiles of small books. Penn is somewhat more helpful
in this, but has the advantage of doing much of the work perhaps decades
after the first EEBO microfilm images were made.
In general, all online publishers of facsimiles, though deserving of our
thanks for making rare, inaccessible, fragile, and/or invaluable material
available relatively instantly right at our desks, could usefully add some
reader's aids in HTML: table of contents and index hyperlinked to the
images.
But maybe that's work for us users. I certainly suggest it to Robert Knapp
for his project.
Al Magary
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