Robyn Adams, Building a Library without Walls: the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, IHR Digital History Seminar, 14 March 2017
Live notes, so an incomplete, partial record of what actually happened.
Tags: dhist
My asides in {}
Stream/Deck: https://www.bsecs.org.uk/conferences/annual-conference/
CELL primary expertise early modern, but as much as making archives matter as anything: and using digital to do that .. CELL has a github: https://github.com/livesandletters
Bodleian Library Project 'Building a Library without Walls' .. historical bibliographical metadata .. Bodleian Benefactors Register (1604) .. not a catalogue but some ideas of bibliographic description do emerge in the document (which Bodley and James were trialling) .. 1605 and 1620 catalogues forms basis for bibliographic data.
Questions such as 'did a book given by donor actually make it to the shelves?', boil down to a concern about how a book moved. So data model designed to fit around finding out more about bibliographic practices, capturing the movement of books.
SQL database .. data model makes a collection of dusty old objects able to speak to one another.
Looked into a making a 3d model of library spaces: but found it was likely to produce few meaningful intellectual insights beyond "of that's nice"
Now I have the data, what can it tell me?
- data is granular
- correlate case studies and create a larger/wider picture of book collection
- nevertheless, case studies - eg Michael Dormer - can be instructive
- provides clues to formation of the collection
DiSCO (Distributed Complex Scholarly Object) model for expressing networks.
- A: Consulted a statistician about sampling
- Q: Knowledge increases as you go along. How would you make the database differently? Not much. Big process of testing modelling at the front end.
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