Book Conservation and Digitization
The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Arc Humanities Press
Published:31st May '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£34.95(9781802701708)
The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate and when the current literature addresses both fields, it does so strictly within technical reports and guidelines, concentrating on procedures and optimal workflow, standards, and technical metadata. In particular, more often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product, leading to misunderstanding and clashes of interests. Surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the challenging conservation-digitization balance and fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book aims at demonstrating that a dialogue between apparently contrasting fields not only is possible, but it is in fact desirable and fruitful. Only through the synergetic collaboration of all people involved in the digitization process, conservators included, can cultural digital objects that represent more fully the original objects and their materiality be generated, encouraging and enabling new research and widening the horizons of scholarship.
Il fulcro di questo lavoro risiede proprio nella fruttuosa collaborazione tra studiosi e professionisti che operano per la conservazione e preservazione, da un lato, e fruizione dall’altro del manoscritto e del libro antico. -- Simona Turbanti * Umanistica Digitale, 10 (2021): 417-21 *
[D]ecades-long efforts to digitize rare books and manuscripts have provided humanities researchers with vast resources that have enabled virtual access and opportunities for research. The timely publication of a volume of essays edited by Alberto Campagnolo provides a veritable master class in the work required to make these digital assets readily accessible online to scholars around the world.
-- Nancy K. Turner * Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 357-61 *Digital platforms that provide remote access to archives and library material are becoming the norm.[...] Anyone who has been involved in the planning and execution of a digitization project, large or small, knows it to be otherwise. Therefore, the publication of Campagnolo’s book is exceptionally timely. It is a welcome reference text for all staff in an archive or library and should be widely read by those planners and decision-makers before embarking on such a project.
-- Zoë Reid * Archives and Records: The Journal of the Archives and Records Association 42, no. 3 (2021): 329-30 *Campagnolo’s work usefully offers a necessary grounding in the history of digitization efforts, some of the major projects that have set the current stage, and suggestions for modes of collaboration among curators, conservationists, preservationists, and other stakeholders to guide the field into the future.[...]I hope this volume will become a standard reading for students embarking on careers in cultural heritage institutions and for those embarking on their own institutional digitization projects. Likewise, I hope book historians, manuscript scholars, and other users of digital databases will take the time to read this volume, as a better understanding of the technical challenges our field faces will allow us to collaborate more fully.
-- Eric Ensley * Speculum 98, no. 1 (January 2023): 228-30 *ISBN: 9781641890533
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
316 pages
New edition