̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - digitisation

Cambridge and Heidelberg announce major project to digitise treasured medieval manuscripts

sjr81 — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:10:35 +0000

Centuries-old manuscripts feature the works of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and Euripides.

‘A sunlit picture of hell’: Sassoon’s war diaries go online for first time

jfp40 — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 08:35:56 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is home to the world’s foremost collection of Sassoon material, and has digitised 23 of Sassoon’s journals and two of his wartime poetry notebooks. They are now available to all at the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), where they sit alongside the papers of Isaac Newton and other priceless treasures of the Library’s collections.

Until now, much of the archive has remained beyond the reach of both researchers and the public because of the documents’ poor physical condition. ̽��ֱ��only person to have had unrestricted access to Sassoon’s journals and notebooks to date was official biographer Max Egremont.

̽��ֱ��digitisation of the Sassoon material, which includes draft copies of his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ as well as poetry, prose and sketches, fulfils an objective formulated during the Library’s £1.25m fundraising campaign to purchase the Sassoon Archive in 2009. ̽��ֱ��campaign, spearheaded by Egremont, was also supported by Sir Andrew Motion, Michael Morpurgo and Sebastian Faulks.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “ ̽��ֱ��war diaries Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine are of the greatest significance, both nationally and internationally, and we are honoured to be able to make them available to everyone, anywhere in the world, on the 100^th anniversary of the First World War.

“From his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ to his eyewitness accounts of the first day of the battle on the Somme, the Sassoon archive is a collection of towering importance, not just to historians, but to anyone seeking to understand the horror, bravery and futility of the First World War as experienced by those on the front lines and in the trenches.”

̽��ֱ��digitisations make available online for the first time 23 of Sassoon’s journals from the years 1915-27 and 1931-32, as well as two poetry notebooks from 1916-18 containing rough drafts and fair copies of some of his best-known war poems. Sassoon wrote in a small and legible hand, frequently using his notebooks from both ends. ̽��ֱ��images of them are both powerful and evocative, showing mud from the trenches and spilled wax, presumably as he sat writing in his dug-out by candlelight.

̽��ֱ��journals give a fascinating insight into daily life in the trenches. Sassoon described the first day of the Somme as a ‘sunlit picture of hell’ and the diaries also record the moment he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Arras, as well as a psychological profile of ‘the soul of an officer’. ̽��ֱ��poems include previously unpublished material along with early drafts of some of his best-known works including an early version of ‘ ̽��ֱ��Dug-Out’ with an additional, excised verse.

Sassoon’s journals represent much more than a simple diary record. ̽��ֱ��notebooks were small enough to be carried in the pocket of his army tunic, and he used them to draft poetry, make pencil or ink sketches, list members of his battalion and their fates, make notes on military briefings, and draw diagrams of the trenches.

“ ̽��ֱ��great array of activities, difficulties and dangers that faced him as a serving officer, and the recurring inspiration of his creative responses to his conditions, are represented in the range of uses to which he put these notebooks,” said Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s John Wells. “Unlike edited, printed transcriptions, the digitisations allow the viewer to form a sense of the physical documents, and to appreciate their unique nature as historical artefacts.”

̽��ֱ��Sassoon collection joins other collections being delivered through the Cambridge Digital Library, which aims to make the Library’s great collections openly available to the world. ̽��ֱ��Digital Library was launched in 2011 and made possible through a generous donation from the Polonsky Foundation.

Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War diaries – some bearing traces of mud from the Somme – are among 4,100 pages from his personal archive being made freely available online from today, almost 100 years since Britain declared war on Germany.

From his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ to his eyewitness accounts of the first day of the battle on the Somme, the Sassoon archive is a collection of towering importance.

Anne Jarvis

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Digital Library

̽��ֱ��Soul of an Officer, a sketch from one of Siegfried Sassoon’s journals. 1916

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A scriptorium of commonplace books

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

‘Scriptorium’ is the culmination of a three-year project in the Faculty of English to digitise and preserve a type of manuscript book well known in 15th- to 18th-century Europe: the commonplace book or manuscript miscellany. And at the heart of the project, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), lies an innovative tool that will help you to read them.

A literary phenomenon

Commonplace books were the personal organisers of their day. Learned men (and, more rarely, women) would compile books containing recipes, accounts, sonnets, quotes, prayers, songs, legal treatises and medical instructions. Sometimes passed from one owner to another and continued over decades, if not centuries, commonplace books would be filled with snippets of contemporary information and culture. ̽��ֱ��keeping of such books was regular practice in the period, enabling their owners to record and remember what they had read, been told or overheard. Each is a unique collection of knowledge: an intellectual scrapbook, the filofax of its time.

A total of 20 commonplace books and miscellanies forms the backbone of the Scriptorium project. These books have been sourced from Cambridge college libraries and the ̽��ֱ�� Library, as well as from archives in country houses like Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Some have a known provenance, such as a 17th-century book of estate management written by William Heveningham, part of which was written during his 18-year incarceration in Windsor Castle for his role in Charles I’s execution. ̽��ֱ��Glastonbury miscellany (c. 1450), a 114-page collection of literary texts in Latin and English, started life as a Glastonbury monk’s accounts book and, after successive interventions by five more scribes, was still being added to a century later.

Daleks aid digitisation

Over the course of three years, the project team, led by Drs Richard Beadle, Raphael Lyne, Andrew Zurcher and Colin Burrow, adapted and developed painstaking techniques to minimise the risk of damage to texts during photography. ‘Daleks’, made from an aluminium bolt and two sewing needles, provided one means of safely applying adjustable levels of pressure on manuscript leaves, to lay them flat for photography. Project researchers, including Drs Christopher Burlinson, Angus Vine and Sebastiaan Verweij, also pioneered new descriptive methods and representational strategies for publishing rare manuscript materials online, including full and searchable analyses of each manuscript, and transcriptions of key selections.

Working in collaboration with the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET), and IT developer Mariko Brittain, the team also developed an expansible, automated manuscript image database that will continue to function and grow beyond the life of the funded project. And with conservation in mind, high-resolution manuscript images have been securely dark-archived in DSpace@Cambridge, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s digital repository.

Help with handwriting

̽��ֱ��art of deciphering old handwriting, known as palaeography, is a difficult decoding process that can be complicated by factors such as the scribe’s style, evolving letter-forms and unusual punctuation. Help in cracking this code is now available from the Scriptorium project’s fully interactive online English Handwriting course. ̽��ֱ��course makes full use of the wide range of hands, styles and idiosyncratic habits represented by the Scriptorium project manuscripts, which were chosen with an eye to their palaeographical range and complexity. This and other resources within the Scriptorium project are dovetailing with teaching and research in the Faculty of English, opening up the literature, history, theology and philosophy of earlier periods to a new generation of students and scholars in Cambridge and across the world.

For more information, please contact Dr Richard Beadle (rb243@cam.ac.uk), Dr Raphael Lyne (rtrl100@cam.ac.uk) and Dr Andrew Zurcher (aez20@hermes.cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or visit Scriptorium (http://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk/).

A digital archive of 500-year-old 'filofaxes' offers extraordinary insight into early thought and writing practices.

̽��ֱ��keeping of such books was regular practice in the period, enabling their owners to record and remember what they had read, been told or overheard. 

By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

15th-century manuscript

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Digital Cambridge takes off

ns480 — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:31:48 +0000

DSpace@Cambridge is ready to take your digital output. Jointly managed by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and the ̽��ֱ�� Computing Service, the DSpace digital repository has been created to store, disseminate and preserve digital content created by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge academic community. Once deposited, most items are freely accessible to all, both within and beyond the ̽��ֱ��.

Since DSpace@Cambridge became a strategic service to the ̽��ֱ�� nearly two years ago, a full service team has been recruited and a total of 555 GB of digital data has now been stored. ̽��ֱ��repository includes everything from scholarly articles to rock art images, medieval and modern manuscripts to lecture series, large datasets and collections.

‘As digital material of all types becomes increasingly important for research,’ said Heather Lane, Librarian and Acting Keeper of Collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute, ‘we rely on DSpace@Cambridge to provide facilities and support to make our digital holdings accessible to the widest possible audience.’ Professor Hugh Mellor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy, added: ’This excellent facility meets the ̽��ֱ��’s growing need to preserve electronically and make accessible material of permanent importance that would otherwise disappear.’

Use of the service for data preservation and dissemination is free of charge to the employees and students of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

For more information, please visit www.dspace.cam.ac.uk or contact Elin Stangeland (es444@cam.ac.uk).

Are you keen to make your research more widely visible or store and preserve your digital material?

This excellent facility meets the ̽��ֱ��’s growing need to preserve electronically and make accessible material of permanent importance that would otherwise disappear.

Professor Hugh Mellor

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Ski jump, Alfred Hugh Fisher, 1867-1945

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