University of Illinois Library

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The German Emblem Book Project



In 1998 the University Library began to collaborate with Professor Mara Wade of the German Department, with the objective of using digitization to make it possible for an increasing number of faculty and students who needed access to study and teach with these materials in a more flexible format than the physical books would allow. Many emblem books are small in physical size (averaging 5” wide x 9” height), and it is very difficult without the aid of a magnifying glass to decipher the intricate detail of an emblem engraving, and the corresponding mottos, many of which are written in Frakturschrift. Further, we sought a method to relieve the continual stress and deterioration that comes with frequent handling of these books, some of which are very tightly bound.

A first pilot project explored the use of flatbed as well as digital camera for image capture, and began to work on a set of metadata elements. A second pilot project, funded by the University of Illinois Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research in 2001, has supported the digitization of fourteen books thus far and the further development of metadata elements and mapping to a standard metadata scheme. Additional support for collaboration has been received from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and support for high-resolution monitors and workstations has come from IBM.


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