Yiddish Literature On-Line

Although I don't know any Yiddish, I was happy to see this morning in Friday's New York Times (courtesy David Meadows' Explorator):

More than 10,000 works in Yiddish — perhaps more than half of all that was ever published in the language — are now accessible online as part of a joint project between the National Yiddish Book Center, based in Amherst, Mass., and the Internet Archive in San Francisco, the two institutions announced on Friday. The scanning began more than 10 years ago as part of a $5 million effort to create the Steven Spielberg Digital Library, said Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the book center.

I was interested to see that those responsible recognize that some people prefer print, because the page linked above adds:

In addition, we can provide you with used copies and reprints of most Yiddish titles at nominal cost. To check availability, please email us at orders@bikher.org, or phone us at 413-256-4900, x196.

I probably would have seen notice of this on Friday except that due to AT&T's poor service my Internet access had been out for most of the last two weeks until Friday afternoon and I had a great deal of catching up to do. I'm in the process of switching all my announcement and discussion list addresses to my Gmail address in the expectation I'll switch providers if it happens again.

Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

Matthew Fisher of UCLA recently posted to the Digital Medievalist list this excellent news of a new site which indexes and links to complete digitized medieval manuscripts in many different collections.

It is with great pleasure that we would like to draw your attention to the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. Hosted by UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Catalogue seeks to provide a technological solution to a simple and rather delightful "problem": the breathtaking increase in the number of medieval manuscripts available on the web in their entirety, but in a bewildering range of venues and formats.

Currently, almost one thousand manuscripts, digitized and available in their entirety on the web, have been entered into the Catalogue. Users can search the Catalogue on basic information about manuscripts, such as the location, language, or date of a codex, or browse through the complete Catalogue.

We welcome feedback on your experience using the website, and particularly welcome suggestions for sites not currently represented in the Catalogue.

The Catalogue can be accessed at: http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu. More information about the project: http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/about.php, or by contacting Matthew Fisher at fisher[at]humnet[dot]ucla[dot]edu.

The site currently links to 37 institutions hosting digitized manuscripts. Although most of the full records include at least a brief note of the contents in the manuscript attributes section, in a random check of about 30 I found three in the St. Gallen collection (Mss. 18, 902, and 722) that do not, and although all the other links I tried worked, the one to the manuscript images for St. Gallen 902 redirected to a 404 message. Fortunately the URL for the error page was specific to that manuscript and simply going up the directory to http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0902/ worked.

I noticed one minor oddity of the interface related to navigation of multipage search results. Page numbers at the bottom of the page link as one would expect, but "Next" takes you to the next span of 10 pages rather than to the page after the one you're at.

Some collections I know of that are not among those indexed are the Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis in Cologne, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, the St. Laurentius Digital Manuscript Library at Lund University, the Olomouc Research Library, and the Irnerio Project at Bologna (although the images there are too small to be of much practical use, I suspect).

A good page of resources on medieval manuscripts can be found at Georgetown's Labyrinth site.

More on Codex Sinaiticus

Back in May I posted about some of the pages of Codex Sinaiticus held by the University of Leipzig being made available on-line. Recently, a cooperative project by the four institutions that own parts of the codex has put up a larger number of leaves from Leipzig and the British Library, including parts of I Chronicles, 2 Esdras and Lamentations, and all of Esther, Tobit, Jeremiah, Psalms (including Ps. 151), and the Gospel of Mark.

The pages are nicely photographed in color, with choices of views with standard light and "raking light," in which illumination is nearly parallel to the page. Even at the highest resolution the images are clear; a transcription is provided, and there's a frame for translations into your choice of English, German, Greek, and Russian, although in spot-checking the only passages for which I found translations were Psalms 1-35, and those only into English.

The first phase will end in November, 2008, and the implication is that after that more leaves will be made available.

The Internet Archive and Microsoft Live Book Search

A recent episode of Leo Laporte's TWiT podcast, number 144 from May 25th, has Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle as the featured guest for the first 50 minutes. He talks about a number of issues, including Microsoft's decision to cease scanning and pull out of the Open Content Alliance, the victory over the FBI in the National Security Letter request and its associated gag order, and other matters related to book digitization.

Evaluating the Quality of Electronic Texts

Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, has an excellent blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. A few weeks ago she posted a clear and detailed comparison of 5 collections of digital texts (Google Books, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Early American Fiction, and Making of America), concentrating on 6 factors that determine the usefulness of each for purposes of scholarship:

• Quality of the scanning
  
• Quality of the OCR/text conversion
  
• Quality of the metadata
  
• Terms of use
  
• Convenience
  
• Reputation in the world of scholarship
  

Presciently she omitted the soon-to-be-shuttered Microsoft Live Book search service.

Her posts are always worth reading, but this one is particularly recommended.

Microsoft Book Search Closing its Cyberdoors

Microsoft announced today that it had advised its partners that its Live Book and Academic search services will be shutting down next week, and that they're going to stop scanning entirely. Fortunately, the content already scanned will continue to be available through Microsoft's general search interface at Live.com.

This is quite unfortunate, because they had done at least as good a job with their interface, provision of metadata, and search capabilities as Google has done with their book search — and often better — and their quality control has been excellent, far better than Google's. The collection made available through Live Books never extended beyond English-language titles (at least I've never seen anything there in another language) and was nowhere near as comprehensive as Google's, but it was a useful supplement.

Some reflections can be found at the Search Engine Land blog, and additional links to related news stories at Techmeme. Peter Suber also provides some extensive quotes from other blogs at his Open Access News blog, and Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, has posted his thoughts at his blog.

ResourceShelf last year provided a useful set of links to other large digitization projects. Oddly, neither it nor the more comprehensive British Columbia site linked there includes Gallica at the Bibliothèque nationale; Gallica is an excellent source of not only French works (including not just books but maps, images, music, and manuscripts), but also of works in other languages, Latin in particular but yes, even some in English. Its interface is less than ideal, but it's usable.

Paleography Resources

Dave Postles of the English Department of the University of Leicester recently announced on Mediev-l the news that he has made available on-line (both directly and as downloads) some resources previously only on CD-ROM, including two tutorials on medieval and early modern paleography (with a self-assessment test; sample question: "Try to convert the regnal year 7 Edward I into the year of grace"), information on the history of the urban development of Leicester, and a book about Oseney Abbey, a medieval Augustinian establishment in Oxfordshire.