Digital Atheneum Project
From ToolCenter
"This work, funded by the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Program, will develop new digital libraries, tailored to the requirements of scholars in the humanities, from aging and damaged portions of the Cottonian Collection at the British Library. The project will deliver state-of-the-art technical approaches to restoring severely damaged manuscripts, searching them as images, and presenting electronic editions for a widely distributed digital library of restored and edited, previously inaccessible, manuscripts.
In particular, the technical focus will encompass the following research areas:
- Restoring manuscripts by using novel lighting methods and 2D/3D digital image processing algorithms making it possible to enhance, recover and restore information that would otherwise be invisible or illegible.
- Searching manuscript collections using a new representation that supports fast and efficient search strategies over the images themselves and the structured information that is added to the image collection throughout the editorial process, such as text, commentary, links to other resources, and restoration parameters applied to specific portions of the images.
- Editing collections using tools that are developed specifically for scholars in the Humanities to allow efficient assembly of complex editions from high-resolution digital manuscript data."
- from Digital Atheneum Project homepage