Lecture Series: Tom Deneire

detail from Petrus Appianus – Gemma Frisius (ed.), Cosmographia sive descriptio universi orbis (Antwerp: Johannes Bellerus, 1584), fol. F3v – University of Antwerp Library, Special Collections, MAG-P 13.821

Click here to (re)read the slides to this platform{DH} talk.

Tom Deneire studied Classics and obtained a PhD in Neo-Latin Literature from KULeuven with a dissertation on Justus Lipsius’s correspondence (1598) and prose style. As a postdoctoral researcher for NWO he studied the dynamic interplay of Latin and vernacular poetry in the Dutch Golden Age. In 2013 he was appointed Curator of the Special Collections of the University of Antwerp Library, an officially acknowledged heritage library that goes back to a Jesuit school collection and also holds a Print Room. As a curator he mainly focuses on registration and digitization projects. His current research interests include Early Modern book history, Neo-Latin literature and digital humanities. He is also co-editor of the journals De Gulden Passer and Humanistica Lovaniensia.

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.