The leaves are the remains of a severely scorched early book, or codex, written in southern Egypt some time between AD 400 and 600. In a basement laboratory of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, an X-ray scanner is pumping invisible beams into a clump of charred parchment leaves that looks as delicate as a long dead flower…READ MORE: Scientists are X-ray scanning an ancient biblical text that’s so old, they’re afraid to open it | National Post
Tag Archives: digitization
The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded… Or has it? | Ars Technica #manuscripts #digitization #analysis #languages #translation #speculative
More recent update from Arstechnica: So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution” | Ars Technica Librarians would have “rebutted it in a heartbeat,” says medieval scholar. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn’t possibly prove.
The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded | Ars Technica
Since its discovery in 1969, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
#3D ‘unwrapping’ tools let scientists read an ancient Hebrew scroll | Mashable #archives #manuscripts #digitization #science
Source: Seales et. al, Science Advances 21 Sep 2016: Vol. 2, no. 9, e1601247, Fig. 2 Completed virtual unwrapping for the En-Gedi scroll.
New software tools have enabled scientists to read an ancient, damaged Hebrew scroll without ever unfurling the fragile, disintegrating parchment.
The digitization techniques, known as “volume cartography,” transformed what were the charred remains of the nearly 2,000-year-old En-Gedi scroll into legible columns of handwritten text from the book of Leviticus, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“We are reading a real scroll that hasn’t been read for millennia,” said Brent Seales, who helped develop the cartography techniques and is a computer sciences professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
READ MORE: 3D ‘unwrapping’ tools let scientists read an ancient Hebrew scroll | Mashable
Czur #Scanner | YouTube #books #scanning #demos #digitization #gadgets
The most difficult problems of scanning books have been solved including flattening curve ,erasing fingerprint, smart edge-cutting and so on. All of these can be done automatically.
How To #Scan 50 Miles of #Historical Documents Into an #Online #Archive | Gizmodo #VeniceTimeMachine #tech #digital #preservation #digitization
Tracking the lightning quick development of modern cities is easy with Google Street View, but the [Venice Time Machine] project aims to provide context for the past 1,000 years of urban evolution in Venice, Italy. The Venice Time Machine will digitize and catalog a staggering amount of historical documents—a combined 50 miles worth of shelves!—then turn the data into an internet archive and adaptable 3D model. READ MORE: How To Scan 50 Miles of Historical Documents Into an Online Archive | Gizmodo
Biodiversity Heritage Library Launches #Crowdsourcing #Games | Library Journal #libraries #search #gamification #volunteer
The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project recently launched its first two browser-based video games, Smorball and Beanstalk. Both are designed to offer players a fun online diversion while helping the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) enable full-text searching of digitized materials. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which was awarded in December 2013, the project is exploring how games might be used to entice people to participate in crowdsourcing efforts at libraries and museums. READ MORE: Biodiversity Heritage Library Launches Crowdsourcing Games | Library Journal
African American Family Records from Era of Slavery to Be Available Free Online | The Guardian #genealogy #archives
Millions of African Americans will soon be able to trace their families through the era of slavery, some to the countries from which their ancestors were snatched, thanks to a new and free online service that is digitizing a huge cache of federal records for the first time.
Handwritten records collecting information on newly freed slaves that were compiled just after the civil war will be available for easy searches through a new website, it was announced on Friday.
The records belong to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an administrative body created by Congress in 1865 to assist slaves in 15 states and the District of Columbia transition into free citizenship. READ MORE: African American family records from era of slavery to be available free online | Life and style | The Guardian.
This is How the Vatican Will Digitize Millions of its Documents | Mashable
Digitizing the Vatican’s 40 million pages of library archives will take 50 experts, five scanners and many, many years before the process comes to a close.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and has around 82,000 manuscripts, some of which date back about 1,800 years. It will work in tandem with NTT Data, a Japanese IT firm, to convert the first batch of 3,000 manuscripts. It is expected to take four years to digitize the initial round, though some of those documents will be online toward the end of 2014.
via This is How the Vatican Will Digitize Millions of its Documents | Mashable
Russian volunteers put the complete works of Tolstoy online | MobyLives | Melville House
Read the article: Russian volunteers put the complete works of Tolstoy online | MobyLives.
Quoteable: “This tremendous response is apposite for Tolstoy: not only of course is he one of the most beloved of the Russian greats, but he believed in the extraordinary possibilities of collective effort.”
Digitized books are available for download on the Tolstoy website. The website is in Russian for now, with an English version still under construction.
Hey Macmillan, Why Does My eBook Say That it Belongs to a Public Library? | The Digital Reader
Hey Macmillan, Why Does My eBook Say That it Belongs to a Public Library? | The Digital Reader
Quotable: “This title is old enough that by the time Macmillan decided to sell the ebook there very likely no digital copy available. The only way to get an ebook was to either type the book into a computer or scan an old paper copy.”
infophile 