Large Scale Manuscript Digitization

Report from the workshop organized by Peter Robinson, Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, Birmingham University, and Marilyn Deegan, Centre of Computing in the Humanities, King's College London (5 June 2006).

Advances in digital photographic technology, mass data store and networking capacity have in the last years reached the point where it is now possible to contemplate large-scale digital photography of manuscript materials. Some projects have reported costs as low as 1 euro a page, inclusive of image store and basic metadata information. Such cost levels, comparable to traditional microfilm photography, would make possible digitization of whole manuscript collections (indeed, several initiatives have achieved this) and, beyond this, digitization on a national and trans-national scale, for example within the EU I-2010 program. However, such claims need to be rigorously examined, as any large-scale digitization programme would need to ensure that it could deliver the quality required while protecting the originals from any degradation through the digitization process.