KOI ANUNTA/YH

Digitizing the Past

View thousands of ancient Egyptian papyri or peruse the original manuscripts of 18th century diarist James Boswell—all from the comfort of your own home. Such convienences and more will soon be possible as Yale joins a worldwide movement in which libraries and universities are making their unique holdings accessible to the world. Photographs, maps, manuscripts, and taped interviews are just some of the items currently being digitized and made available over the Internet.

Currently, Yale is involved with Berkeley, Columbia, Duke, University of Michigan, and Princeton in a joint project to digitize approximately 50,000 pieces of papyri—the ancient form of paper invented in Egypt. These digitized artifacts will then be available to the general public, via unrestrictied Internet access. So far, approximately 3,000 images have been digitized. This may seem like a large amount of progress, but by the year 2000, the six schools will not even have come close to finishing just one of the first six collections to be digitized.

However, according to Dr. Roger Bagnall, the Columbia professor who heads the project, the effort is a worthwhile one. Once a piece of papyrus becomes an image on a computer screen, manipulation of the artifact becomes much easier. "One can blow up parts of [the digitized image] for close-up study, change the colors to enhance legibility, and so on," Bagnall said. "For teaching it dramatically changes the ease of pointing things out to a class."

Another advantage to digitial papyrus is that scientists can then piece together fragments of a document whose parts are spread throughout the world. "Papyrus fragments are scattered in libraries all over the world: parts of one document, for instance, might be on three continents," Christa Sammons, a curator at the Beinecke Library noted. "Web images have greatly facilitated the matching-up process."

The papyrus project is far from complete. Instead, Bagnall envisions an ongoing effort to increase the digital collection by bringing in more institutions. "The Project in a larger sense will go on practically forever, as more collections join," Bagnall said.

Yale's digitization efforts, though, extend far beyond the papyrus project. The Divinity Library, for example, has digitized around 4,000 images and 50 texts thus far. It currently has three different projects underway. One of these is the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia Image Database, which consists of photographs related to higher education in China from the 1800s to 1950. It currently contains 600 digitized photographs and may have more in the future.

According to Martha Smalley, the curator for Day Missions Collection at the Divinity Library, these databases "allow faculty to share their images with other faculty members and to organize their images in a way that makes them more useable."

Professor Carlos Eire, GRD '79 currently uses one of the Divinity Library's digital databases for his course on Reformation Europe. Most of the primary texts are available in digital format through the database. "If the students do not want to spend money on the books or on TYCO packs or if they want to avoid reading in the sixth circle of hell, CCL reserve, they can find what they need on the web site," Eire said. "If this were the case for every single course taught at Yale, imagine the possibilities."

The National Endowment for the Humanities(NEH) has funded many digitization projects throughout the country. With funding from the NEH, Project Open Book was made possible, so that 2,000 history books became digital books. The 440,000 images that make up the digital books cover the histories of the Civil War, Medieval Spain, Communism and Fascism, and Native Americans. The purpose of the NEH project was to assess the feasibility of converting books on microfilm to digital images. Due to software incompatibilities, the digital books aren't currently accessible via the internet, though the Civil War materials will be available by early summer. However, and perhaps most importantly, "we now have quality specifications, know what works and doesn't work, and are able to apply the technology for all kinds of related library services," Paul Conway, head of the Preservation Department said.

The movement to make library resources and collections widely available through digitization is bound to have an enormous impact on teaching, research, and other scholarly activities. Sammons herself wonders what this new digital movement means for the curators of history. "Are we, in effect, creating a new canon, based on availability?" Sammons asks. "If so, this is a serious responsibility—will digitization produce a body of material that is available out there and will be accessed and used by people because it's the easiest thing to get, even though it might not be a balanced selection of what there is?"

Only time will tell. Nonetheless, students and teachers alike will undoubtedly benefit.

"I can think that if I'd been able to see a Eugene O'Neill manuscript, in that neat, miniscule hand, I might have had quite another experience reading his plays," Sammons said.

What do you think? Respond in Speak your Mind.

Back to Online Features...