Rare Book Room

I viewed the Rare Book Room. It contains full scans of about 500 rare books originally published as early as the 1400s.

1) Selection Decisions

Since rare books are hard to come by (aka “rare”), I suspect the library’s creators have decided to include any and all rare books they come across. This means the development of the collection is left largely to chance. When afforded an opportunity to scan a new book, the project librarian(s) may find it necessary to analyze or redefine what makes a book “rare” so as to avoid bastardizing the collection and alienating its audience.

2) Metadata

Each book lists author, title, city, date, and the library that houses the physical book. The collection can be viewed by category, author, or housing library and searched by author, title, date, city or housing library. It is interesting to note that although books can be sorted by a category such as cooking, a search for cooking will find no results.

Some, but not all, books also contain a description providing additional information about the author, the copy that was scanned, the history of the work, etc.

3) Object Characteristics

Each representation of the actual books begins with a scan of the cover. A scrolling left frame shows thumbnails of each two page spread, each of which can be selected and will bring up a larger image (like in PowerPoint). Each spread is numbered and can be enlarged and reduced at will. The user can scroll through spreads, jump to the beginning or the end, or type in the spread number desired. The navigation buttons are a bit confusing because they all look very similar and, for some reason, they allow the user to disable the function of scrolling through spreads. There is however a help button to explain the navigation.

Additional metadata at the object level includes info on how many spreads are in the book and which spread is selected.

4) Audience

There is a footer at the bottom of every scan of every spread that says “For research use only” which makes me think they believe their site is used by researchers as opposed to generally-interested members of the public. This is probably true because, although they are neat to look at, the novelty of the images wears off soon enough and it is not easy to actually read the books because the reduced images are too small to see the text and the enlarged images are so large they require horizontal scrolling on most monitors. There is no option to make the images a nice medium size.