Seales, William B. University of Kentucky Res Fdn $499,924 - 36 months
The Digital Atheneum: New techniques for restoring, searching, and editing humanities collections
This work will develop new digital libraries from aging and damaged portions of the Cottonian Collection at the British Library, tailored to the requirements of scholars in the humanities. The result of this project will be state-of-the-art technical approaches, tools that incorporate those new approaches, and a widely distributed digital library of restored, previously inaccessible manuscripts. In particular, the technical focus will encompass the following important research areas: o Continued development of new illumination techniques for damaged and aging manuscripts using novel lighting methods to make it possible to recover markings and information that would otherwise be invisible o Creation of a semantic object model and framework for creating digital collections that will support domain or data-specific restoration and content-based search/access o Incorporation of novel processing techniques for digitally restoring, enhancing, and searching/annotating manuscripts that have suffered damage from fire, water, and aging The project has strong support from IBM through the Shared University Research (SUR). Likewise, partnership with the British Library provides priviledged access to high-quality collections, manuscript and curator expertise, and digitization facilities.
