Learn more about this exciting project of the National Archives at:
http://www.naa.gov.au/publications/corporate_publications/digitising_tling.pdf

See an example of a digitised record:
http://naa12.naa.gov.au/scripts/imagine.asp?B=91407&I=1

BioMed Central just released (Mis)Leading Open Access Myths, a catalog of 11 objections to OA with a careful reply to each one. The objections are distilled from the publishers' testimony in the UK inquiry. This is a superb aid for advocates and for the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee as it digests the testimony of the publishers.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

http://www.ichim.org/UK/01.html

ICHIM 04, the eighth International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting
will take place in Germany from August 30 to Sept. 3, 2004, at the "Haus
der Kulturen der Welt", Berlin. It will be focusing on digitization of
cultural heritage and on the emergence of new digital art and culture forms.

Curators, computer scientists, administrators, publishers and media
producers, educators, IT professionals, scholars, entrepreneurs,
libraries and museums professionals, artists and others invested in the
intersection of technology and culture will come from around the world to
share their experiences, learn new methods and forge new partnerships.

Yesterday I was present on the little Cologne workshop on digitization projects made by German libraries. I gave a talk on the results of such efforts. You can read my very critical paper in German here. At the end of my text I emphasized the importance of open access for heritage collections. Mr. Schoepflin (Library of the Max Planck Institut for the History of Science Berlin) presenting the project ARCHIMEDES (with some nice technical features) also did so.

A Literary Treasure Trove for Scotland

A unique multi-million pound treasure trove of writings from some of the greatest world figures of the past two hundred years could be on its way to the National Library of Scotland.

This outstanding archive containing private letters, manuscripts and other correspondence from Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, Herman Melville, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edith Wharton, to name a few, is being offered to the National Library at a reduced price in order that the collection is kept in Britain.

The Murray publishing family, which is based in London, owns the archive but the current head of the family, John Murray VII, wants the collection to be placed in the National Library of Scotland because of the strong Scottish content and the fact that John Murray I was born in Edinburgh.

The collection would be sold to the National Library of Scotland for just over £33m. Experts believe the true market value of the archive to be in the region of at least £45m.

As a result of the sale John Murray will establish a family charitable trust, one of whose purposes will be to support access to, and preservation, of the archive. This will include a gift of £3m to the National Library to cover the running costs of the archive.

The archive is a who's who collection of British authors and is thought to contain many undiscovered literary and historical treasures along with political, scientific, engineering, travel and exploration material which would provide a rich source of information on British life and society over three centuries.

Today the Scottish Executive is granting £6.5m towards the purchase. An application for £22m has been made to the National Lottery fund. The National Library is also announcing an appeal to raise the remaining £6.5m so that this unique archive can belong to the nation.

[...]

Martyn Wade, the National Librarian, said, 'The archive has a distinctly Scottish flavour and it would be as though the collection were coming home. It's wonderful that the Scottish Executive has set the fund-raising ball rolling. This is a unique treasure trove of invaluable artefacts and having them in the National Library of Scotland would be an immense achievement.'

The National Library of Scotland houses more than eight million printed items and has manuscript and rare book collections of international importance. This collection would add to its standing as one of the world's great libraries.

John Murray said, 'I am offering the Murray Archive to the National Library of Scotland as my ancestor, the first John Murray, who founded the publishing house in 1768, came from Edinburgh. It therefore seems appropriate that the archive should return home. Also, so many Murray authors, such as Walter Scott, David Livingstone and Isabella Bird, were Scots, and throughout our history we have had close links with Scottish publishers and booksellers.

'We are asking £33m for the John Murray Archive which has been valued at a minimum of £45m.

'£3m will be handed over immediately to the National Library of Scotland to endow the archive. The aim is that the Library should not have to call on any of its normal funds for administering the archive.

'The balance will go into the John R Murray Charitable Trust and a key purpose of this Trust will be to support the Archive whenever the need occurs such as for future conservation or the purchase of items that relate to the Collection. It will also endow 50 Albemarle Street to secure its future as one of the UK's key historic buildings.

'No member of the Murray family will gain personally from the sale.'

[...]
Notes to Editors on the John Murray Collection

* John Murray Publishing was established in 1768. The founder, the first John Murray, was born in Edinburgh in 1737. Seven generations of Murrays have run the business. It is now owned by Hodder Headline publishers.
* John Murray is the seventh generation Murray to run the business. The firm of John Murray was one of the greatest and perhaps the most influential of all British publishing houses, with an unrivalled list of authors.
* The archive includes the personal and business papers and correspondence of the Murray publishing family and includes literature, exploration, politics, scientific and engineering discovery.
* The letters journals and manuscripts date from 1768 through to 1920. In total there are more than 150,000 items.
* Authors include, Lord Byron, David Livingstone , Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, John Galt, James Hogg, Sir John Kirk, and Herman Melville to name a few. JMW Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for Murray books.
* The National Library of Scotland is one of the leading research libraries in Europe. It houses eight million printed items and has been a Legal Deposit library since 1710. Every week it collects more than four and a half thousand new items.
* In order to raise the purchase price of £33m the National Library of Scotland has applied to the Heritage Lottery fund for £22m and must also raise £6.5m itself to match the the Scottish Executive £6.5m.

2 March 2004

National Library of Scotland

http://www.nls.uk/news/press/murray0304.html

Title: Archives and Archival Traditions : Concepts of Record-keeping in the Ancient World
Series: Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents
Author: Brosius, Maria
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2003
Description: Our oldest archival records originate from the Near East. Systems of archival record-keeping developed over several millennia in Mesopotamia before spreading to Egypt, the Mycenean world, and the Persian empire, and continuing through the Hellenistic and Seleucid periods. Yet we know little about the way archival practices were established, transmitted, modified, and adapted by other civilizations. This interdisciplinary volume offers a systematic approach to archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and showing how archival systems were copied and adapted across a wide geographical area and an extensive period of time.

This book is intended for ancient historians, assyriologists, and schoalrs interested in the tradition of archival practices
Contents: Maria Brosius, Ancient Archives and Concepts of Record Keeping - An Introduction
Alfonso Archi, Archival Record-keeping at Ebla 2400-2350 BC
Piotr Steinkeller, Archival Practices in Third-millennium Babylonia
Karel van Lerberghe, Private and Public, The Ur-Utu Archive at Sippar-Amnanum (Tell Ed-Der);
Klaas R. Veenhof, Archives of Old Assyrian Traders
Nicholas Postgate, Documents in Government Under the Middle Assyrian Kingdom
Alexander Uchitel, Local Differences in Arrangements of Ration Lists on Minoan Crete
Thomas Palaima, "Archives" and "Scribes" and Information Hierarchy in Mycenean Greek Linear B Records
Frederico Mario Fales, Reflections on Neo-Assyrian Archives
Alan Millard, Aramaic Documents of the Assyrian and Achaemenid Periods
Heather Baker: Record-keeping Practices as Revealed by teh neo-Babylonian Private Archival Documents
Maria Brosius, Reconstructing an Archive -
Account and Journal Texts from Persepolis
Joachim Oelsner, Cuneiform Archives in Hellenistic Babylonia - Aspects of Contents and Form
Antonio Invernizzi, They Did Not Write on Clay - Non-Cuneiform Documents and Archives in Seleucid Mesopotamia
John K. Davies, Greek Archives - From Record to Monument
Willy Clarysse, Tomoi Synkollesimoi.
ISBN: 0199252459

Found at
http://contents.lib.u-tokyo.ac.jp/contents/index.html

http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews8-1.html#faq

Conclusion:

There is as yet no commercial or open source software for automatic transcription of, or the creation of searchable indexes from, handwritten historical documents. However, it is an active area of research and progress is being made. Continued advancement depends on the availability of funding. Librarians, archivists, and scholars may be able to push the agenda more effectively by partnering with computer scientists who share an interest in solving this challenging problem and improving access to significant historical archives.

http://www.libr.org/progarchs/

Progressive Archivists is a discussion group and caucus for archivists (and anyone else) interested in social responsibility in the context of the archival profession.

Discussion list at: http://www.topica.com/lists/progarchs/ (actually unavailable)

What are the benefits of embedded transcripts vs. external transcripts?
There are three:

1. You can put the cursor over a word you have trouble reading, and the transcript of that word will appear in a tooltip. You can also display the entire line of text for better contextual understanding.

2. You can copy and paste selected text from handwritten pages to another computer document, such as a Word file, as part of your research and knowledge discovery activities.

3. You can perform search and retrieval operations on handwritten pages, allowing handwritten pages to be integrated with printed pages in one archive.

http://www.planetdjvu.com/embedding_transcripts_in_handwritten_pages.htm