Session Number
30
Description
The management of manuscript collections - unique, irreplaceable, fragile - has historically struggled to reconcile preservation with access. Academic librarians know only too well the uneasy negotiation between the conflicting imperatives of security and availability, conservation and use, which comes to define a level of public service in this area.
It is therefore not surprising that here, as elsewhere, the potential of new electronic media is increasingly a matter for investigation. Manuscripts transcribed, keyboarded or scanned into microcomputer systems become "virtual" manuscripts, no longer unique or fragile, potentially unlimited as to time, place, frequency and volume of use, retrievable through a multiplicity of access points, manipulable into sets or views for specific research or teaching purposes.
This paper chronicles one such process of investigation and experiment, Sheffield University's Hartlib Papers Project, which has been set up to test the outcomes of the application of the latest in information technology to a collection of some 25,000 manuscript sheets.
Windowing the Past: A Seventeenth Century Technological Archive and Its Electronic Exploitation
The management of manuscript collections - unique, irreplaceable, fragile - has historically struggled to reconcile preservation with access. Academic librarians know only too well the uneasy negotiation between the conflicting imperatives of security and availability, conservation and use, which comes to define a level of public service in this area.
It is therefore not surprising that here, as elsewhere, the potential of new electronic media is increasingly a matter for investigation. Manuscripts transcribed, keyboarded or scanned into microcomputer systems become "virtual" manuscripts, no longer unique or fragile, potentially unlimited as to time, place, frequency and volume of use, retrievable through a multiplicity of access points, manipulable into sets or views for specific research or teaching purposes.
This paper chronicles one such process of investigation and experiment, Sheffield University's Hartlib Papers Project, which has been set up to test the outcomes of the application of the latest in information technology to a collection of some 25,000 manuscript sheets.