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About
Early Modern Letters Online is a combined finding aid and editorial interface for basic descriptions of early modern correspondence. Currently containing calendars of eight contributiong collections, it aims, with your help, to become the first union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century letters. You're currently using the public beta, an advanced prototype designed to obtain further feedback from our users in advance of the final release candidate in late 2012. Let us know what you think, and get involved!
Context
Early Modern Letters Online and its underlying editorial environment — EMLO Edit — has been built in under two years by developers from Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services (BDLSS). It was created under the auspices of Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford with generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We are using several interrelated methods to reconstruct the correspondence networks that were central to the revolutionary developments of the seventeenth century, an aim to which this fledgling resource is central. In short, we believe that the digital revolution of recent decades finally can provide tools adequate to studying this aspect of the communications revolution of the early modern era, and that a central, web-based inventory of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century letters — most of them still only available in manuscript — is vital to enable scholars to navigate the vast sea of correspondence from the period. For full details of our activities, which include the creation of hard-copy scholarly editions and a lively events programme, head along to the Project website.
Credits
EMLO is a genuinely collaborative effort amongst the Project's committed team of designers, developers, editors, librarians, managers, researchers, and systems developers. The software for the prototype catalogue and its editorial interface has been created by colleagues from BDLSS of Bodleian Libraries. Editorial and scholarly credits for our individual contributing catalogues may be found on the collections page. In terms of systems development, our lead developer and overall superstar is Sue Burgess; Sue helped specify and hand-coded EMLO Edit from scratch, and has spent the last year in Pylons whipping front-end functionality into shape after the private alpha launched in September 2010. Monica Messaggi Kaya, our designer, is responsible for the catalogue's look and feel, while Mat Wilcoxson did a fine job of building the first prototype (which also benefited from additional coding from Anusha Ranganathan). We also have Mat to thank for the basic bar charts on our people profiles, which he implemented under the direction of visualization guru Scott Weingart from Indiana University (here's a video of Scott in action). Overall technical direction was provided by Neil Jefferies, while further coordination and project management was provided by Dr James Brown, Erin Cooper, and Dr Christine Madsen. All catalogue icons are sourced from The Noun Project and srd.
We also wish to thank colleagues from the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Sheffield, especially Professor Mark Greengrass, Michael Pidd, and Jamie McLaughlin, for kindly making the correspondence within the Hartlib Papers available online in accordance with our schedule; participants at two data workshops held in Oxford in 2009 and 2010, at which key aspects of our object model were discussed and refined; and participants at two intensive focus groups in 2011, expertly designed and led by our editor Dr Kim McLean-Fiander. Special thanks are due to colleagues and collaborators from Mapping the Republic of Letters (Stanford), Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (The Hague); and to the Electronic Enlightenment Project (Oxford) for their generous advice and support at the outset of our activities.
Technical Overview
EMLO runs on the Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), an object management and preservation platform designed to support digital library projects within the University of Oxford (notably the futureArch initiative and Oxford University Research Archive). As such, it benefits from an unusually flexible technological workflow designed to permit the rapid ingest, cleansing, and interrogation of legacy data presupposed to exist in a variety of formats (from XML/TEI formats to access databases and humble spreadsheets), as well as the effective scaling of the system as the volume of content grows. The core EMLO object model allows contributors to provide metadata on four epistolary entities – letters, manifestations (different archival and printed versions of the same letter), agents, and locations – across a maximum of seventy fields, in the format of their choosing. These files are then ingested into a powerful 'back end' – EMLO Edit, running on Postgres – where they are related via an RDF-based linked data approach, and cleansed and de-duplicated by the contributor on a remote basis using a powerful suite of web-based editing and merging tools. Publication-ready data is released to the front end – you're using this now – built with Pylons web framework, which lays over the object store a set of discovery services that provide full text indexing and faceted search (Apache Solr), as well as unglamorous but vital administrative tools such as virus scanning, text extraction, job scheduling, and versioning. The open–access portion of the system also caters for data-sharing protocols such as OAI-PMH, PAI-ORE, Atom, and RSS. For a detailed look at our catalogue storage solutions and workflows, see this schematic. Further questions? Our technical lead Neil Jefferies will be happy to help (neil.jefferies(at)bodleian.ox.ac.uk).
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Copyright
EMLO is provided free of charge for private, non-commercial use only. Users are expected to respect the copyright of the holders of the original images and creators of the transcriptions (in cases where these have been generated). In particular, images of letter documents in the catalogue – all currently from the Bodleian Library, but with many more from other institutions in the pipeline – are reproduced under licence from the libraries and archives in possession of the originals (indicated clearly on image profile pages), and must not be reproduced or redistributed in any form without prior permission from the relevant repository.
Copyright of the metadata contained within individual catalogues remains with the respective individuals and projects responsible for generating it – these details are available from the Collections page, linked from each entry – and with the Bodleian Library in the case of the Bodleian Card Catalogue. In the final release we hope to be able to expose this material by means of a Creative Commons licence, but in the meantime please Contact Us if you wish to reuse any of our metadata.
Citation Guildeines
As a union catalogue first and foremost, EMLO consists largely of metadata – or, data on data – so it is unlikely that you will want to cite the majority of our records without consulting the originals (either in manuscript or, if available, printed or electronic format). You should also bear in mind the known issues itemized below. However, we have a small and growing number of transcriptions and manuscript images, so if you would like to cite these please observe the following conventions:
Citing Catalogue Images
When citing one of the letters for which we currently possess images, please cite the original repository (prominently displayed in the 'Repositories and Versions' section of each work profile) using the citation format of your choosing, followed by this information:
- Image consulted on Early Modern Letters Online, followed by a colon;
- The short, persistent URL of each record (available in 'Record Tools' to the left of each profile);
- The catalogue URL (in brackets), followed by a comma;
- The date on which you accessed the record (also in brackets).
For example, a citation for this record might read:
1636, Henry James to Isaac Lyte, Bodleian Library, Aubrey 12, 236-237. Image consulted on Early Modern Letters Online: http://tinyurl.com/6zvjkwh (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, 16 December 2011)
Citing Catalogue Transcriptions
When citing one of the letters for which we currently possess transcriptions, please cite the original repository (prominently displayed in the 'Repositories and Versions' section of each work profile) using the citation format of your choosing, followed by this information:
- Transcription by [INSERT NAME], consulted on Early Modern Letters Online, followed by a colon;
- The short, persistent URL of each record (available in 'Record Tools' to the left of each profile);
- The catalogue URL (in brackets), followed by a comma;
- The date on which you accessed the record (also in brackets).
The name of the transcriber(s) is reproduced underneath each record, and in the permalink. For example, a citation for this record might read:
1684, Edward Lhwyd to Robert Plot, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 1817b, 421.Transcription by Helen Watt and Brynley Roberts, consulted on Early Modern Letters Online: http://tinyurl.com/6eksdka (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, 16 December 2011)
When citing a Hartlib transcription originally prepared by the Hartlib Papers Project to which we link through, please cite the original repository (prominently displayed in the 'Repositories and Versions' section of each work profile) using the citation format of your choosing, followed by this information:
- Transcription by the Hartlib Papers Project, consulted via Early Modern Letters Online, followed by a colon;
- The short, persistent URL of each record (available in 'Record Tools' to the left of each profile);
- The catalogue URL (in brackets), followed by a comma;
- The date on which you accessed the record (also in brackets).
The name of the transcriber is reproduced underneath each record, and in the permalink. For example, a citation for this record might read:
1620, Richard Pernham to Samuel Hartlib, Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers 49/27/1a-2b. Transcription by the Hartlib Papers Project, consulted via Early Modern Letters Online: http://tinyurl.com/6et6v2j (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, 16 December 2011)
Known Issues
Although we think we've ironed out most of the major creases – especially in terms of issues of design and functionality – this is a beta (or advanced prototype) release designed primarily for testing, so you are strongly encouraged not to rely on it too heavily at this stage. Outstanding issues, which we will deal with over the coming year, can be grouped into three broad areas:
- Editorial – Most importantly, we're still working through the process of merging and de-duplicating places, repositories, and letters themselves; even with the box of tricks that is EMLO Edit, this is a painstaking process. Significantly, it's still possible that the same letter will appear in two contributing catalogues, leading to double-counting of all of its metadata, and erroneous results in the browse screens. In addition, cross-referencing and verification of dates in the Bodleian Card Catalogue is ongoing (so don't be surprised by the occasional howler). Please do tell us about such problems as you encounter them, but rest assured our editorial team is likely already to be working on it.
- Functional – Most performance bugs have been identified and remedied, but as with any project of this scale, things will have slipped through the net: a field or checkbox will not work, a link will be broken, or a certain combination of queries will lead to an error message. If you encounter such issues when exploring the catalogue, please do let us know. We'd also love to hear your desiderata and feature requests.
- Design – After several iterations we're broadly happy with the look and feel of the catalogue, but will still be tweaking, refining, and polishing over the course of the following year. Browser compatability is also an issue; EMLO currently looks at its best on modern, standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 9 and not on Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 (something we're working to fix). In any case, do let us know what you think of our design.
Contact
You can email us at emlo(at)bodleian.ox.ac.uk
You can telephone us on: +44(0)1865 615026
Alternatively, you can write to us at:
Early Modern Letters Online
History Faculty
University of Oxford
George Street
Oxford
OX1 2RL
