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

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.

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)...