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project: Papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 - 1859)
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| Project start date: 2004-04 | Project end date: 2005-05 |
The University of Bristol, UK, holds over 33,000 pages in the Brunel Collection. This collection contains the personal papers of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. However, despite its importance as a scholarly resource, no electronic catalogue of the collection exists and physical access is limited. In 2003 the University was awarded an AHRB resource enhancement grant to carry out a pilot digitization project to bring this resource to a wider audience via the Internet. This resource will be freely available online by Brunel's bicentenary in 2006. The aims of providing access to a larger audience and understanding more about such a key historical figure sit alongside the technical goals of an open source, open standard, easily extensible and migratable image database and electronic catalogue.
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| 2d scanning and photography | Data capture |
| Searching and querying | Data analysis |
| Text encoding - descriptive | Data structuring and enhancement |
The source material is the University of Bristol's Brunel Collection, held in the Special Collections department of the University Library. This is the largest collection of the papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and consists of plans, sketchbooks, notebooks, diaries and letters, and is consulted by a wide audience, including academics, engineers, schoolchildren and Brunel enthusiasts. The Department of Archaeology and Anthropology is working closely with the Library to electronically capture and document part of the resource, and the Library will ultimately be responsible for curating the digital resource.
The resource consists of digitised surrogates of Brunel's sketchbooks, loose letters, and a sample of pages from his notebooks. These have been captured in a high-quality format and processed to jpegs for optimal web presentation. The high-quality images are kept as master archive files. The level of granularity is one page, i.e. each record item in the database is a single page of either a book or letter. Each page has corresponding descriptive, technical, and hierarchical/structural metadata. The resource can be browsed through the collection hierarchy or searched by keyword, including keywords pertaining to Brunel's engineering projects.
Production of TIFF files from RAW (NEF) files for archival purposes. Production of compressed JPEG files from RAW (NEF) files for web dissemination.
Devlin, Kate. "The Brunel Collection: piloting digital archiving". Proceedings of the IS&T Archiving Conference 2005, Washington DC, 26-29 April 2005.
| Principal staff member: | Dr Mark Chatwin Horton |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | Computing officer(s) / Technical supporter(s), Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s) |
| External expertise: | Advice from the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) and the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) |
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| This project description was developed as part of the ICT Guides project. |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Kate Devlin / Mark Horton |
| Title | Papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 - 1859) |
| Record created | 2005-11-07 |
| Record updated | 2010-01-27 15:09 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2208 |
| Citation of record | Kate Devlin / Mark Horton: Papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 - 1859). <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2208> created: 2005-11-07, last updated 2010-01-27 15:09 |
