Turning (Virtual) Pages of History

Dubber writes "Today the British Library announced this cool web site. A nice blend of quick loading images and voice overs of 10 major books on display. "Turning the Pages" brings together on the web treasures of several world cultures, along with scientific works, e.g. Leonardo da Vinci's Notebook, Elizabeth Blackwell's Herbal and Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica."

Comments

Never heard of any of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course I went to school in Alabama, so that might explain it.

FP?

[tpearson]

From what I have seen this appears to be a pretty good site with a good layout and good content.

icniV aD

[rburgess3]

Are they going to read Da Vinci's notbooks backwards?

Re:icniV aD

[luferbu]

So why don't you just magnify the image and then press the "Mirror" button?

An excellent site

[Anonymous Coward]

which works in Firebird as well though they say you need IE5.5 and up.

Great lit as well. I tolerate the /. trolls to find sites like these.

Re:An excellent site

[KlaymenDK]

... but you do need a Shockwave Director plugin.

Well, that was shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

The content on that site is so bad that it is unusable. I give it 10/10 for the idea of making these rare documents available online, 1/10 for the implementation.

They've built a series of flash applications presenting very low-resolution images that are unnavigable. The "magnify" doesn't help at all - viewing an unusably tiny window of the document. It needs to have:

(1) High resolution images of the documents.
(2) Translations of the text so that visitors can understand what the documents say.
(3) Digitally restored images (photoshopped) to fix the fading and bleeding that some of the sketches have undergone.

These three points would have made the visit worthwhile. Instead it's a monumental waste of time.

Re:Well, that was shit.

[luferbu]

Not precisely translations, but using the "Text" button you can read some of the content of the pages and some explanations.

Re:Well, that was shit.

[paz5]

(1) High resolution images of the documents.

If you look at the link they give you for each of the documents it includes the phrase narrowband. This may mean that there are higher resolution versions of these books. On the main page they also say that they are experiancing very high usage of that portion of the page, and it would be logical to assume they took down the high quality ones until the rush of people subsides.

(2) Translations of the text so that visitors can understand what the documents say.

I'd have to agree with you there...

(3) Digitally restored images (photoshopped) to fix the fading and bleeding that some of the sketches have undergone.

While this seams like a nice idea, It then isn't really a duplication of the orriginal document. It would also not be needed if they take your second sugestion.

Re:Well, that was shit.

[danila]

While this seams like a nice idea, It then isn't really a duplication of the orriginal document.
Nothing prevents them from making two images (original and restored) available with the ability to switch between them by a single click on them (one line of javascript).

Re:SP?

[wafwot]

So you wouldn't care if you were to be able to view the pages of Beethoven's 9th symphony? You wouldn't care if you were able to view the original scribblings of Einstein?

It's not whether or not you can understand what you're reading, it's the idea that you're looking at a piece of history.

Keep in mind that it's because of people like DaVinci and Galileo, who invented and theorized despite of social (read: religious) stigmas that we have the science and technology that we have today.

If you don't care at all about the historical value of what's on the linked pages then you have no inherent right to read anything at all that is posted on /. After all, none of this would be here if it weren't for pioneers like them.

Fantastic!

[fuzzybunny]

This is superb.

I'm glad to see that more and more antique classic texts are becoming available online in good quality. This reminds me of Octavo, whose business is creating high resolution scans of such books and selling them--at least someone's archiving them. Narrative artifacts like these books, the Bayeux Tapestry (warning: cheesy graphics) and other nice books should be more visible to casual browsers--they're really impressive to see in person, but it's great to be able to actually "touch" them or page through them.

I visited Bologna in Italy two weeks ago, and as it was shitty rainy weather, we ducked into St. Peter's cathedral to have a look around. There's a little museum near the back, with some absolutely unfuckingbelievable mediaeval illuminated manuscripts under glass.

Unfortunately, the things are sort of chaotically stored, opened to random pretty pages, on top of each other--you can tell that they probably just lacked the funding to display them properly in some super duper high tech low light argon case. I'd have loved to have a look through them using something like this British Library site.

It pains me to think how many more books/paintings/manuscripts/tapestries/whatever are lying in dusty badly kept display cases or storage crates around the world.

By the way, if slashdotters have contacts to people who do this kind of archiving, the books in that cathedral would be a great treasure to preserve.

Tee hee ---

[Tore S B]

...nice blend of quick loading images...

Not for long. :)

Re:SP?

[twenty-exty-six]

I was commenting on the lack of activity in this thread, not the actual article. Sorry for the poor choice of words.

Re:SP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Beethoven's 7th I might consider. Apotheosis of the dance and all.

Fantastic!-LizardTech.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do this everytime the subject of archiving paper comes up. I believe that Lizardtech does archiving, or at least sells what you need. Really one with a good high-resolution book-friendly scanner (one that allows you to hang part of the book off the edge without distortion) can do it with the free software (Epson makes some good ones, if you can afford them?)

Heron (Hero) of Alexandria

[cr0sh]

Does anybody know where one could find a reprint (digital or otherwise) of any of Heron's works (particularly Pneumatics - spelling is probably wrong)?

Ideally, what I would like to see is like what was done with Da Vinci's notebooks - original on one side, translation (to English) opposite. Even so - I will take what I can find (and it doesn't have to be a recent reprint, either - anthing from about 1850 forward I could probably afford)...