Speaker
Dalia Guerreiro (Lisbon School of Economics and Management)
Abstract
Digital humanities reinforced the need to place content online, emphasising its use and reuse and allowing works to be read by humans and computer algorithms. The old book has readers, especially among researchers in the humanities and the history of other areas of knowledge. Its existence is no longer confined to library shelves, as it is available in digital libraries worldwide, although it is not always available appropriately. Digital libraries are crucial to research in the Humanities, requiring more efficiency and flexibility in tailoring access to the information. The body of incunabula and old book (printed before 1801) available online is expressive and tends to correspond to the Humanities research demands, stressing the need to improve instruments to the research and access to the work’s content: text transcription and text markers; creation of connection points, such as summaries with the works textual and iconographic content; implementation of translation tools. Turning the old book online implies, firstly, knowing its material features and, secondly, determining the researchers’ requirements. This presentation stems from the hypothesis that digital libraries benefit from accessing these collections. The direct observation of digital library websites and incunabula and old book collections available in digital libraries allowed us to collect data about digital edition and research and retrieval data models, as well as to identify the incunabula and antique books specific features and the way these interferes in making them available online. The research was founded on a literature review about digital libraries and articulated with the Digital Humanities issues, consenting to characterise the current state research and identify new projects in this domain; it was complemented with the research in book studies to describe incunabula and antique books concepts. The research method included interacting with a focal group of Humanities researchers to collect data about how they use digital libraries, the advantages and disadvantages of their physical congeners, their expectations for improvement, and better correspondence to the research. A Humanities researcher’s panel validated the results, confirming the previous hypothesis that digitising is not merely a transposition of support from paper to digital but a supplementary edition creating different reading forms and access to the information content. Two Portuguese digital libraries, the National Digital Library (Biblioteca Nacional Digital, BND), mainly the old book collection available, and the Alma Mater at the University of Coimbra, were analysed based on those assumptions and considerations. It is concluded that the old book digitation presents specific requirements and needs the creation of tools that, for research purposes, contribute to making its intellectual content more accessible and intelligible. However, it appears that digital availability models add low value towards printed texts due to the inconsistencies or lack of access points to the various structural components of the work and its complementary elements.