One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the library in [St. Gallen, Switzerland]’s abbey, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ...
The idea to scan the library’s manuscripts — above all, the 350 that date from before 1000 — was born as a reaction to the devastating floods that swept Dresden, Germany, and its artworks in 2002, said Ernst Tremp, an expert on medieval history who is the library director.
What started as a pilot project in 2005 grew sharply last year, when the Gallen project was incorporated into a program to digitize all of Switzerland’s roughly 7,000 medieval manuscripts. At the same time the Mellon Foundation agreed to finance the St. Gallen project with a two-year, $1 million grant, with an option to extend it for another two years after 2009. ...
So now, day by day, a team of scanning experts works in a small room above the library, gingerly arranging manuscripts on two large frames that use suction devices to spread the pages and lasers to ensure that they are not spread so wide as to damage a binding.
High-resolution digital cameras and video recorders then copy the pages and download the images to a database, where they are prepared for presentation on the library’s Web site. Already, about 200 manuscripts are in the database, and 144 are available online. ...
The project has increased the number of visitors the abbey library draws ...
“The library has become more visible,” [project director Christoph] Flüeler said. “On the Internet we now have more visitors than in the real library.” ...
The scanning has increased the requests from museums and libraries to borrow the manuscripts themselves and to use the illustrations in books and other publications. So great have the demands become that Mr. Flüeler set up a small company last year to handle them, with the profits going toward financing the scanning. ...
Comment. Despite the age of the documents, the project claims that the digitized images aren't in the public domain. See the site's terms of use:
The virtual library CESG and its related content is offered exclusively for personal, non-commercial use. It is not allowed to publish, redistribute, license or sell images, metadata or other content of CESG ...
All images may be used for private, personal, educational and non-commercial purposes (especially for education, research and science). Please be sure to cite the source of the content used ... We reserve the right to refuse the use of our content in particular cases. ...
Update (10/22/08). See Klaus Graf's comments on St. Gallen's claim that these manuscripts are not in the public domain (in German or Google's English).
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/21/2008 07:30:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
