Facsimiles

https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/manuscript-road-trip-the-spanish-forger/

• The Spanish Forger -- 19/20c making medieval illuminated initials; reusing parchment, sometimes text/image don't relate

https://twitter.com/SocAntiquaries/status/1183774797844623360 "Charles Stothard was commissioned to draw the Bayeux Tapestry for the Society in 1816. During his 3 visits to Bayeux he also made small plaster casts - by taking wax impressions of the linen - to capture the detail of the embroidery. Of course, this would never be allowed today!"

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/preservation/2019/10/18/hidden-hornbooks/

Trajan’s column at v & a: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/trajans-column

https://collation.folger.edu/2017/07/photographic-facsimile-from-1857/#easy-footnote-2-14226

See:

• Johnston and Van Dussen 2015, Foys article
• Mak 2011

Work on EEBO as facsimile project

Diana Kichuk, "Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)," Literary and Linguistic Computing 22.3 (2007)

"What is the impact of remediation in digital facsimiles? … Alternatively, doe she process of digitization and remediation transform the original work into a virtual artifact with an ersatz resemblance to an original?” (292)

“From the outset, UMI used the recently perfected 35mm microfilm camera and silver halide on acetate base 35mm film. After the 1980s, it used the more stable polyester base film. EEB has three film generations: a first-generation master or preservation negative-polarity film (white on a black background), a copy negative, and multiple working copies (either negative or positive polarity) for distribution to subscribing institutions. Positive polarity images have black text or illustra- tions on a white background, the standard polarity of distribution copies.” (293)

“Operators excluded images that might not convert well to black and white, for example, the frontispiece paintings in works from the incunabula period. Operators systematically excluded front matter and end papers, including handwritten notes added by a reader.” (293)

All images are 400 PPI, produced from second-generation negative polarity EEB master “in order to avoid subjecting the original master to wear and tear” (294)

“The enthusiasm engendered by the liberating experience of accessing facsimiles anywhere anytime coupled with the potential of online analysis undreamed of with print or microfilm, suspends the scholar’s incredulity. The longer they look, the more the facsimile becomes the ‘real thing’. The scholar rationalizes the only version of the work she will ever examine—the ‘only thing’—as the ‘real thing’. “ (296)

“If the digital facsimile is to serve as a virtual and ubiquitous stand-in for the original work and undergo such wide scholarly scrutiny, then it is very desirable that its identity be as true as possible. What standard of identicalness should such a facsimile have?” (297)

“ProQuest’s choice, driven by economics and practicality, places the remediated microfilm image at the center of Early English textual studies for years to come, at least until there is a renewed drive to digitize extant print copies directly using state of the art technology, thereby substantially surpassing EEB and EEBO in resolution and completeness. EEBO prolongs the influence of the microform facsimile and ensures that libraries continue to acquire and maintain EEB as a necessary supplement.” (297)

“Works routinely start with the title page and end with the last page of text, excluding front and end pages, consecutive blanks, and special front matter, such as incunabula paintings.” (298)

“Although improvements in communication tech- nologies promise to bring the reality of the perfect ‘clone’ facsimile ever closer, is it achievable? Is it desirable? The cost would be prohibitive. The remediated digital facsimile cannot overcome its surrogacy or the incompleteness of absorption of the old medium. The question is not whether it needs to do this (does print have to justify that it is not a manuscript?), but whether publishers and scholars will openly acknowledge the limits of remediation, guard against publisher claims of authenticity and avoid scholarly artifact creation and misreading. Scholars may be keenly aware of the limits of remediated primary sources, but it is a learned awareness. Each generation must rediscover for itself the limits of new media and interpret how it affects their research.” (302)

Shawn Martin, "EEBO, Microfilm, and Umberto Eco: Historical Lessons and Future Directions for Building Electronic Collections," Microform and Imaging Review 36.2 (Fall 2007): 159-64.

"Many of the same arguments about preservation, greater access, and easier search capability are similare to the arguments about mass microfilming only 50 years ago. What is or is not unique about digitization as opposed to microfilm, and, more importantly, what lessons from mass microfilming can be learned for modern electronic projects?" (159)

Eugene Power, was employed by Edwards' Brothers Printers, left to found UMI

"Because of growing fear of a German invasion of the U.K., it was decided to preserve as much of England's cultural heritage as possible." -- began filming STC volumes (160)

"Originally, this project was envisioned as a preservation project, but soon libraries came to realize how important such a collection would become to scholars on their campuses." (160)

"One of the most notable shifts that seemed to happen in the 1950s was the emphasis on getting access to the content within EEB rather than preserving it. Eugene Power originally envisioned his microfilm projects as helping to preserve content of Britain and many other places and distributing that content to libraries around the world so that if any one copy should be destroyed many would still remain. That view of microfilm has remained up until the present day. Even into into the 1990s this view continued to dominate. If a book was microfilmed, that was the preferred method of preservation of a book. On the other hand, if it had been digitized, that is a method of providing access to that book, not preserving it." (161)

shift toward libraries now spending money "on content the library already owns, but cannot access to the full extent that electronic technology allows" (162)

Ian Gadd, "The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online," Literature Compass 6/3 (2009): 680-692

article is in some ways a "footnote" to Martin and Kichuk (above)

STC, Pollard and Redgrave, pre-1641

• Catalogue of editions and issues, not copies
• Catalogue of survivors
• Limited to English language books printed anywhere in the world during this time — so “the very large numbers of foreign-printed Latin books imported into England from the 15c onwards are not to be found in STC, meaning that one cannot read STC’s contents as a full representation of Britain’s print culture prior to 1641”

Wing, by Donald Wing between 1945 and 1951, up to 1700

• Printed between 1972 and 1998
• Excludes periodicals and other ephemeral items that STC had catalogued

Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, ESTC, established at British Library in mid-=1970s

• Computerized cataloguing project, made available through published microfiches and CD-ROMs
• Exclude serials, bookplates, trad e cards, playbills, and blank forms or engraved prints, music, or maps
• “Did away entirely with genre-specific information; the organizing unit was solely the individual edition” (684)

1987, incorporate STC and Wing into ESTC to create newly-titled English Short Title Catalogue

• Made available in 1994, CD-ROM published in 1998 and 2003
• 2006, ESTC made freely available on internet through BL
• “ESTC is a hybrid database consisting of three sets of catalogue records, each constructed on different principles.” (684)

Eugene Power, University Microfilms (now ProQuest), founded in 1938

• Began copying English books pre-1701, using STC and Wing
• By late 1990s, several thousand reels published in two series, “Early English Books, 1475-1640” and “Early English Books, 1641-1700”
• “Power originally envisaged the microfilming of pre-1701 books as a way of improving the research collections of US university libraries that otherwise had rather limited physical holdings of such books” (685)
• 1998, UM (now ProQuest) began making digitized copies of microfilms available to subscribing institutions, creating EEBO

2003, Thomsn Gale (not Gale Cengage Learning) put Eightenth Century Collection films online, creating ECCO

“By bringing together the bibliographical record for an edition and (usually but not always) only a single witness of that edition,22 EEBO is obviously aiming to provide a useful scholarly mechanism in terms of searching but by doing so are implying – albeit not deliberately – that the record and the copy are one and the same thing.23 It would be better, perhaps, if EEBO represented itself as a library of copies, rather than a catalogue of ‘titles’.” (687)