The hand-written annotations Charles Darwin made on 700 of the books in his personal library were painstakingly transcribed in the 1980s.
Now, thanks to high-resolution digital imagery and an international partnership between Cambridge University Library, Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Natural History Museum in London and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (a collective of ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions in the US and UK), Darwin’s marginalia will be digitally married to the texts they illuminate, allowing scholars to learn his thoughts on a wide range of topics.
The project is supported by the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration grant programme offered by the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) and JISC.
The grant programme funds collaborative projects undertaken by scholars from the U.S. and U.K. who are working to develop new digitisation projects and pilot projects, add important materials to existing digitisation projects, or develop infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing).
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Awards for the projects range from approximately £135,000 to £200,000 ($200,000 to $300,000) for a period of eighteen months starting September 2009. Details about the other projects are below:
The University of York and Arizona State University are bringing together two large digital libraries related to archaeology so that both libraries can be searched simultaneously. A web services application will be developed to allow researchers to cross-search metadata records held by Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the U.K. and The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) in the U.S., covering the archaeology of England and the United States.
In a second stage, a richer and deeper cross-search web facility will be developed for databases recording animal remains in England and the United States, providing a valuable research tool for archaeologists in both countries.
The School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London is working with Yale University to bring ancient resources to life through a virtual reading room for Islamic manuscripts; these will include Arabic and Persian manuscripts by Arab philosophers, physicians and scientists alongside relevant reference materials. The project will build a suite of tools that will analyse the digitised manuscripts and cross-reference them with supplementary materials, an infrastructure which will serve as a model for other special collections and libraries rich in manuscripts and related reference materials.
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