Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
/. After all, none of this would be here if it weren't for pioneers like them.
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
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.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Not precisely translations, but using the "Text" button you can read some of the content of the pages and some explanations.
(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.