Since we’re supposed to get a tropical storm here in Boston this weekend and it’s pouring out right now (Thursday noontime, US EST), I went looking for a ‘tropical storm’ image for our pick this week. Before I could find one, though, I came across a [Collection of medical and magical treatises] from somewhere in the fifteenth century and decided this was definitely worth a highlight.
Primary Source Sets
MHL Collections
Reference Shelves
Users do have to log in to see most of the resources on Historical Texts, but the UKMHL collection is the first collection openly available on the web. In addition to Historical Texts’ existing indexing and search capabilities it was also decided that a visualization toolset should be developed to aid the user in exploring the 66,000 plus documents currently comprising the corpus (soon to be increased as indicated above). The tools allow enhanced and serendipitous searching solely inside the UKMHL collection, which is a boon for those accessing that collection from the web. These experimental aspects of the project offered very valuable opportunities for debating the merits of tools to aid ‘in-site’ discovery – a debate still ongoing through Jisc’s LiveLabs. The current toolset has been developed for, and is fully focused on, the UKMHL corpus, but the Historical Texts advisory group decided that it liked some of the tools, so these may be integrated and are made available to logged-in users to deploy across the entire spectrum of content on the site. Localized search is a critical factor in ensuring that large digital libraries provide the user with the means of delving more deeply into the content, and for this we needed to utilize a robust metadata schema. Full text searching is also enabled, making the search highly effective across a range of content, though it should be noted that the OCR has so far not been corrected, so improvements in accuracy will need to be made.