Presentation at Art Libraries Conference, Florence, October 2016

1. A Modest Proposal – The Digitisation
Programme of the National Art Library
Martin Flynn
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
20 October 2016

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The Victoria and Albert Museum – V&A

3. Current Exhibitions
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 Undressed
 Opus Anglicanum
 Revolutions
 Engineering

4. Future Exhibitions
 Pink Floyd
 Ocean Liners
 Balenciaga
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The National Art Library
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National Art Library – Some Highlights
 Illuminated medieval manuscripts
 Artists books
 Private libraries – Forster and Dyce
 Literary material
 Probably the largest collection of sales catalogues
 Over half of collection in languages other than English
 Exhibition catalogues

7. Extracts from Bleak House manuscript, Charles Dickens, with
author’s alternative titles (Solitary House, Ruined House etc)
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8. Jonathan Swift’s Corrections Gulliver’s Travels
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Themes
 Funding Streams
 Institutional Culture
 Technological Developments
 Equipment Costs
 Specific Digitisation Initiatives

10. Funding Streams
 Google and Microsoft
 The People’s Network
 European Funds
 JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)
 British Library – HE focus
 V&A Priorities and Culture
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11. V&A Culture
 FuturePlan Developments
 Priority is object collections
 Digital content is a challenging concept in our
collections and object based environment
 Museum databases cannot cope adequately with
books
 Differing metadata standards
 V&A and E-Publishing
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12. Exhibition Road FuturePlan Project
Current Work Model Plan
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13. Museum E-Publishing - ISSUU
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14. V&A Publishing
Latest Catalogue Reprints as EBooks
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15. Search the Collections Options
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16. Search the Collections Result
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The Route to Digitisation – Costs and Technological Developments

18. 200th anniversary of Dickens’s Birth – Tale of Two Cities, Mystery
of Edwin Drood and David Copperfield published online in 2012
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19. Degenerate Art – Entartete Kunst Typescript
Published Online 2014
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20. Wassily Kandinsky - Destroyed
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21. ECCO (18th
Century Collections Online)
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22. Empire Online – Adam Matthew (Sage)
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23. World Fairs – Adam Matthew (Sage)
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Current Technology – Image Access
 Bookeye 4
 Bookeye 3

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Internet Archive – South Kensington Art
Handbooks

26. Metadata and Download Options
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27. OCR and Search Inside the Book
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Workflow Software - Goobi

29. Discoverability
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30. The Future
 Scale up the programme
 Use of volunteers
 Further commercial partnerships
 New library management system
 Crowdsourcing transcription of Bleak House
 Cultural change to make digitisation a core activity
 Perfection the Enemy of Progress
 Internet Archive V&A Group
 Getty Research Portal
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