From the point of view of a librarian, CDs are the worst way to distribute
this kind of project. We've got lots of CDs purchased in the '90s on our shelves, that are now unusable due to deterioration of the media or obsoleteness of the platform. Anything that depends on current browsers will suffer the same fate before many more of us have tenure. An online source, with institutional backing that ensures it will stay online and be maintained as technology changes, is much to be prefered. I'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of functionality for the sake of permanence, since the functionality will evaporate anyway with the next generation of browsers. The ongoing institutional support has to be sufficient to re-engineer the project from time to time to keep it working with new browsers and other tools as yet unimagined, which is no small commitment. It makes sense therefore to avoid doing one-off development and instead develop standard tools and protocols for presenting these projects.
Peter Binkley Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian Information Technology Services 4-30 Cameron Library University of Alberta Libraries Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2J8 Phone: (780) 492-3743 Fax: (780) 492-9243 e-mail: peter.binkley@ualberta.ca
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Baker [mailto:psb6m@virginia.edu] Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 06:36 AM To: elizabeth.solopova@bodley.ox.ac.uk; Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subject: Re: [dm-l] Re: Exeter Book CD: for free?
Digital Medievalist Journal (Inaugural Issue Fall 2004). Call for papers: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/cfp.htm
Thanks for this clarification, Elizabeth. I was very excited to find the Bod's images site just as I was preparing to teach Exodus to my grad. seminar last spring. What the Bod is doing here seems a good solution: the images are available for free; you can get an accurate text of the Junius poems free too. But the CD adds value for those willing and able to pony up the (perfectly reasonable) £50.
Well, it adds value for most. Not for me, since I run Linux. Not for the large numbers of medievalists who run Mac OS X. I think it a really dreadful mistake to use MS's extensions to JavaScript, forcing people to use The Worst Browser Now Available. On the other hand, the Dictionary of Old English made the same mistake, so at least you're in good company.
Peter
Elizabeth Solopova wrote:
Digital Medievalist Journal (Inaugural Issue Fall 2004). Call for papers: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/cfp.htm
Dear All,
The Junius 11 CD-ROM (Bodleian Digital Texts 1) was published by the Bodleian rather than OUP. The Bodleian supported the project financially (the development of software), provided the images and contributed to the development of the interface. All the
technical and
academic work was done by Burnard Muir and his team. The
images published
on the CD were already available when the work on the
project started six
years ago: they are still available free of charge for
personal use by
researchers via Early Manuscripts at Oxford University (http://image.ox.ac.uk/). The next project in the series
will be MS. Auct.
F. 2.13 (Terence's Comedies). The images are also available
via the Early
Manuscripts at Oxford University site. The CD-ROM works only
with Internet
Explorer because Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript
was used (you may
have noticed the use of JavaScript in the extract posted by
Martin). As far
as I know Burnard Muir's team will try to overcome this
limitation in the
next CD-ROM.
Elizabeth
Dr. Elizabeth Solopova Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts Bodleian Library Broad Street Oxford OX1 3BG Tel.: +44 (0)1865-277073 E-mail: es@bodley.ox.ac.uk Internet: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/
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