Manuscript

In today’s dissertation session we had a lecture by Dr. Johanna Green on Special Collections as Archives with a concentration on Medieval Manuscript Archives. She highlighted the Exeter Book as a Digital Resource through the Exeter Manuscript Project. The segment of this lecture that stood out for me was the usage of emerging tools such as touch screen tablets to allow students to interact with manuscripts by examining the elements of a manuscript. It was also revealed that through markup language the manuscript text was also translated for users of the app to read in their language. This segment was of particular interest to me because it incorporated an underlying theme of specialist repositories employing technology to achieve effective archival outreach. An additional aspect of the lecture was the willingness of some institutions to allow users to capture images of these documents to contribute to DIY digitisation projects on the institution’s Flickr account. These initiatives extend the arm of archival outreach requiring users to participate in the process. Although DIY digitisation was not the central focus of this lecture, this lecture gave me greater insight into the potential capabilities of DIY digitisation as an effective outreach strategy . DIY digitisation projects involve all stakeholders including users (especially academic researchers), potential users and holding repositories. These projects present a 360 approach to archives in that all stakeholders are involved in the process. Nevertheless, I do admit that issues with format compatibility, quality and integrity may arise in these types of projects. Yet these can be resolved accordingly with standards. Besides , contributors still have to comply with research room guidelines and permissions. Ultimately, DIY digitisation with the platform for sharing is advantageous for everyone as it is cost effective, creates dialogue and it provides a medium to examine records from different angles and perspectives. Most importantly, it is a tool that can be used to reach a global audience. After all, the conservation, preservation and storage of archives is meaningless without some form of user access.