The Digital Imaging and Collation of Early Printed Books in the British Library

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Following several visits to the British Library (BL) in London for discussions on collaborative research, in March 2002 we succeeded in digitizing all pages of the first (1476) and second (1483) editions of Caxton's Canterbury Tales at the BL. We also engaged in joint research with BL staff to devise the most appropriate method for processing the resulting images, giving special consideration to optimization for Internet delivery. In addition, we also conducted joint research with the Canterbury Tales Project currently under way at De Montfort University, making available digital data for The Canterbury Tales on CD-ROM. The completed digital facsimiles were then used for textual comparison and collation. This enabled us to make an important discovery: we identified previously unknown type that had been used by William Caxton. Furthermore, using high-resolution digital images of all of Caxton's type, we developed a method for the OCR transcription of early printed books in which each individual type is identified through pattern matching. This technique was implemented to create a pilot edition. For comparison with the early printed books in the BL, we also created digital facsimiles of the 15th-century printed books and late medieval manuscripts in Keio University Library; these were then used for bibliographical research. Focusing on the early printed books and manuscripts of the same period, we performed diplomatic transcriptions from high-resolution digital images using LaTeX. These transcriptions - which accurately record the original layout, text and font diversity found in the source materials - were then made available on a network for platform-independent access. In summary, we successfully completed (1) collaborative research with the British Library and other UK institutions; (2) the digitization of early printed books; (3) the digital comparison and collation of texts; and (4) digital content creation using digital facsimiles.