UA Library

Digital Special Collections: a Rare Book Librarian’s Perspective on Digital Research

Special collections libraries have by no means missed the digital turn. On the contrary, curating materials that are mostly copyright free and dealing with reproduction reqeusts on an almost daily basis, special collections libraries are excellent partners for digitization projects and digital research. Conversely, this implies that digital scholarship on rare books, manuscripts, maps and prints has a lot to gain from the librarian’s perspective. Understanding how physical objects are digitized, how different items are catalogued, and how to extract data and metadata from library systems offers clear heuristic and methodological gains for digital research. This presentation will discuss such a librarian’s perspective starting from the Special Collections of the University of Antwerp Library. It will explain the library’s digitization process and digital platform, analyze its metadata structure and export formats, and finally offer some research suggestions for data mining and other digital scholarship.