Dear Friends,
I'm writing to share my Simmons Library Science students' final project, a reconstruction of Ege's "Fifty Original Leaves" no 29 using the Fragmentarium interface. As with last year's project on Ege no. 30, each student was assigned one leaf of no. 29 to catalogue in Fragmentarium. Then we worked together in class to put the leaves in the correct order, using Fragmentarium to reassemble the manuscript. We used the Schoenberg Database to look for records of the manuscript when it was whole (we couldn't find any with certainty). The final step was to analyze the reconstructed manuscript to see if we had enough evidence to determine Use - although we only had Compline from the Hours of the Virgin and so not enough evidence for Use there, we had nearly all of the Matins responsories from the Office of the Dead and were able to determine that the manuscript is Use of Rome. Those of you with one of Ege's "Fifty Original Leaves" portfolios in your collection may wish to update your record for no. 29 to indicate the Use. Feel free to add the link to the reconstruction as well:
FOL 29: https://fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-waaj
Now, while I will grant you that this particular manuscript is hardly going to make art-historical waves or have any major liturgical significance, the project was a huge success from a pedagogical standpoint. My students determined the contents of each leaf by identifying the liturgy, worked together to put the leaves of each section in the right order, and used both the updated Madan tests and the online version of Ottosen to analyze the liturgy. They learned how to work in a IIIF/shared canvas environment, how to work with VIAF and other authorities, and how to parse and catalogue a Book of Hours. Their individual records are online and public (I've proof-read all of them) with persistent URLs, something for their resumes as they begin looking for library jobs. If/when more leaves come to light, they can easily be added. The images we've used, some of which are phone-camera snapshots, can be easily replaced if/when better images become available. While many of the leaves are online in their home institution's digital repository, none of those images are IIIF-compliant yet. If/when any of them make that transition, I intend to use Fragmentarium's IIIF feature to import them directly, replacing the image-files we uploaded to the Fragmentarium server. In the meantime, the Fragmentarium records for individual leaves include URLs of home-repository records if they exist.
This is the fourth Book of Hours reconstruction I've worked on with my students - we've done Ege 29, 30, 47, and 48 so far. In case you're interested, here are the other links:
FOL 30: https://fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-djs6 FOL 47: https://lis464.omeka.net/ FOL 48: https://fol48.omeka.net/
Next year, we'll work on FOL 31.
I hope you are all well, and I wish you all the best in 2019!
Lisa