A Case of Considerable Interest

http://ve.torontopubliclibrary.ca/case_of_considerable_interest/index.html

An exhibition celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection of the Toronto Public Library

This online exhibit is just a portion of the Arthur Conan Doyle collection in the Toronto Public Library. It’s divided into three parts, the published Works of Doyle, The world of Sherlock Holmes, and Doyle’s connections to Canada. The sections can be accessed by clicking on the corresponding bookshelf on the front page. Pages from inside a book can be found after clicking on the thumbnail of the book to go its page. There is no way to know which books have inside pages available from the thumbnail pages.

1) Selection decisions
This is only a very small portion of the collection. These items were chosen as an overview only. There is no indication as to why these specific works were chosen. The only information given is that these are “some of the unique and varied items” in the collection. More of the collection than this is digitized because there is another online exhibition from 2004 that has different content from the collection.

2) Metadata
There is virtually no Metadata available for the collection. We know it was made in 2006 and the Copyright is with the Toronto Public Library. The images are not much better. Everything has captions; Books also have Author, Publisher and date information. Some have links to the project Gutenberg page so you can read the whole book. Handwritten pages usually have links to transcripts.

3) Object Characteristics
The images available are all quite small, it appears that the size was chosen to allow the smallest text to be read (barely) but nothing more detailed. This means that the book covers especially are quite small. The only large object in the collection, a transatlantic map, is zoom-able and pan-able. The exhibition would have been better if everything was like that. I know the images exist in higher resolution form because, one item, the Hound of the Baskervilles Cover, is duplicated in the earlier exhibition I mentioned in a higher resolution.

4) Intended Audience
The audience is anyone who is a fan of Sherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle in General. Images are too small to be of scholarly interest.