The Medieval Book

This week in class we discussed the ways that annotations can be used to bring new aspects to websites, articles and digitized material to improve understanding these items.  We mainly focused on the use of annotations in digitized manuscripts especially on projects by the British Library and Library and Archives Canada, Spanish flu records, where these organizations sought for broadening the transcriptions of these documents by allowing the general public to leave annotations.  The discussion included the potential danger and advantages that allowing public annotations on documents may cause and the ways that the annotations can help democratize the process of sharing information as they are by nature publicly available and visible if one breaks the barrier to entry on entering the world of annotations.  one key issue that we discussed regarding annotations was the lack of a set series of standards that could govern or give uniformity and consistency among the varying programs that allow for annotation which causes a definite barrier to entry for people to begin annotating documents.  The readings provided also discussed the reluctance of institutions to allow for such systems to be used publicly and then related back to there own systems as well as the reluctance of scholars to embrace the use of annotations among availability to the public.  We also discussed the embracing of annotations among institution such as Harvard university and the exciting prospects that can stem from wider spread of the adoption and the future that it may hold.

This week we got to go on a field trip to the Preservation Centre (National Archives and Library of Canada) in Gatineau, Quebec. It certainly was a good way to start off the week and not to mention, actually have a fun Monday! The building itself is in the middle-of-nowhere Gatineau, however the architecture of the building is pretty cool; the architect is from the Prairies so he integrated the Prairies lifestyle into the building. For example, the building inside contains things that look like oil rigs, kitchens that look like silos from the outside, and the office area on the top floor looks like a little Prairie town (barns, steel huts, silos, you name it!). The building and its architecture is already cool enough… and what they have inside is even better.

There are three levels of “vaults” which contain all the archives. I unfortunately did not take notes while on the tour, however I distinctly remember our tour guide mentioning that mostly everything they have (archives, photographs, paintings) was in the millions (if I recall correctly, there are 22 million books!). Here is their website with all the numbers and more information: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/events/Pages/2017/pcg-welcomes-you.aspx.

The amount of detail and thought that went into creating this building and its functions in order to protect the archives is mind blowing. The fire system is extremely advanced and it will detect where the fire is and only spray water on that specific area; the floors are even slightly tilted so that the water will run down to a pipe in the wall that will drain the water. The rooms also have to be kept at a certain temperature and humidity in order to preserve the items in the vaults. For example, most rooms were kept at a 18°C with 25%-35% humidity. There was one room, however, that contained negatives and nitrogen photos so that the room had to be kept at a freezing temperature of -18°C.

During the tour we were shown into some of the vaults (thankfully not the -18°C one), and my personal favourite was the vault that contained the paintings. I could not believe the amount of paintings nor how amazing they were! The oldest painting in their possession is from the 1690s. Another great thing is that most of their collection is digitized; here is the link to the search bar: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/all. We were also shown the digitization lab – where all the magic happens! The machines and scanners they have are unbelievable; there is always an influx of projects being done to digitize their collections. They even have a machine (robot?) that turns the pages of the book while taking pictures of every page.

This was truly a great experience and I am so glad that our professor organized it for us, it was great! I encourage anyone who likes/loves this kind of thing to book a tour at the Preservation Centre or even the one on Wellington Street in Ottawa – it is definitely worth the time!

This website/blog now also has an Instagram: medieval_book. We’ll be posting some pictures of the tour on our Instagram story this week so take a look if you want to see some cool stuff!

Hi everyone,

This last week the exhibit team decided to prioritize finding a space to host our manuscript exhibit. I was in charge of getting in touch with CUAG to ask about possible spaces we would be able to use with them. This sounded relatively straightforward. On their website, they have a list of people to contact and everything appeared to be fairly simple. However, after sending emails and waiting a couple of days it became evident that no one was going to answer. I checked their open hours to see if there was a time I could stop by, however, the hours that they are open I am busy with class/work. I asked our group if someone had a time available they could drop by and luckily Veronica was able to stop in and ask about getting access to space. Veronica provided me with another email that she was told to contact to ask about possible exhibit spaces. So, I sent out another email – again with no reply. Although my efforts were unrewarded, my teammates had much better luck.

Ian had luck asking about possible spaces in the library. Veronica was in touch with the history department and was able to get us approval to use one of their display cases as well. As a group we decided to use the history department display case. After work I walked over and took pictures of the space to share with our group. We all think that it will be a very good match for our exhibit.

The next steps we are going to take is choosing which manuscripts to include in our exhibit space and providing good reasoning why. I am very excited to see what we come up with.

See you all in class!