The well-known quotation from St. Augustine on science and unwise Christians appears at Quodlibeta.
Year: 2009
Koln archive building falls into large hole in ground
According to the report on the English pages of Der Spiegel, the 1971 building collapsed. Work on the tube line running under the front wall may be responsible. Loads of documents may be lost, some dating back to 922 AD. It’s unclear whether any medieval manuscripts will have gone west. More here (in German), which links to a PDF showing pages of a 9/10th century gospel manuscript on p.20 of the PDF.
I bet that they didn’t allow anyone to photograph them first. In most disasters, the fire brigade are called in to saturate the building with water, just in case any documents escaped. That usually finishes them off!
UPDATE: The Cologne Archive is currently asking for volunteers in the area to help with the disaster recovery. If you are interested in helping out, please see the archive website: http://www.koelner-stadtarchiv.de/index.html
The future of online research
An important article here in Digital Humanities from Greg Crane of Perseus, looking at where we are and where we go with collections like Archive.org and Perseus. It includes discussion of experiments with OCR’ing Ancient Greek, and an image of the Venetus A manuscript of Homer.
Holy desktop, Batman!
From the ever excellent Way of the Fathers I learn of a company selling a set of Windows/Mac OSX icons, depicting the Fathers. It’s only $5, so might be a fun item.
What happened to the Ephraim icon? Is that a beard completely covering his face?
Some of the lettering on the Ephraim icon ought to be in Syriac, really. If anyone buys this product, perhaps they’d like to contribute a review?
Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum vol. 1 now online
Thanks to Stephen C. Carlson, I learned a few days ago that volume 1 of Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum was online in PDF form at Google Books here. Unfortunately this 1872 book is kept behind their “US-only” firewall, although it is out of copyright everywhere in the world.
I’ve placed an ILL for volume 2, which I will scan if it arrives and place online at Archive.org.
In preparation for this, I’ve also put the volume 1 PDF on Archive.org where non-US viewers can see it. It’s here. I suggest US viewers use the Google books link, which is faster.
The work itself consists of short entries on figures in the Syriac church from the beginning down to the author’s own time. A parallel Latin translation is provided. The first volume is the important people in the West Syriac church; the second is their opposite numbers in the East Syriac church. I don’t know what volume 3 is, tho!
Internet Archive blog
There is a blog for the Internet Archive (archive.org). It’s here, and I’ve added it as a link.
Three Israeli bible mss available for download
At Paleojudaica I learned of this message from Elhanan Adler:
The National Library of Israel, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project, is pleased to announce the digitization of three of the Library’s most important Bible manuscripts… The manuscripts are presented in the DjVu format which provides high quality, magnifiable images compressed into relatively small files for easy downloading. In order to view DjVu images it is necessary to download and install (once) a special free viewer program.
This is a red letter day. A major library has made manuscripts available in a downloadable, easy-to-use format. Well done, boys! That is what we want to see.
Hippolytus, Apostolic tradition now online
Tom Schmidt writes that he has completed digitizing the English translation of this obscure work, which he has made public domain! Excellent news all round. I sympathise with his experiences of doing it, tho, really I do!
The Monte Carlo approach to borrowing books
Everyone knows that libraries lend books. Some people know that you can borrow books not in the local library via an inter-library loan. A few people know that you can borrow books from the national library this way, or get photocopies of journal articles.
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Sometimes it’s worth pushing the envelope a bit. Today I’ve rolled the dice to see what I can get. I’ve placed an order for volume 1 of Abbeloos 1872 edition of Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum. Will it arrive, I wonder?
The book itself is the most recent publication of this 13th century Syriac text, which has an entry on all the important figures of the Syriac church up to that time. It comes with a Latin translation. No translation into any modern language exists, yet it is the foundation of all our knowledge of Syriac literature. It’s pretty old, now, and hard to get hold of. It’s a prime candidate for reprinting and for Archive.org.
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There are a few copies around; it isn’t that rare a book, although copies never seem to come up for sale online. Abbeloos died in 1906, so the book is out of copyright everywhere. But the problem is whether any library will allow anyone to take a book of that age home; whether any library that holds it will lend it. I don’t know; but let’s see!
Usually I ask for books which I can borrow. I don’t believe that anyone will lend me this book for use at home. But possibly some liberal university will loan it “for use in library only”. This isn’t helpful, of course, unless I can take my scanner into the library and do the necessary there. I’ve asked for permission; we’ll see if that is forthcoming.
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Why stick to the well-beaten path, after all? Let’s go for the burn!
PS: See the comments; it turns out that volume 1 is on Google Books, albeit inaccessible outside the USA.
Uploading to Archive.org
Like most people, I have become used to searching Google books and Archive.org for out-of-copyright scholarly texts. These are an enormous blessing to us all, where books normally hidden in University rare books rooms can be downloaded as a PDF.
I’ve become aware that it is possible to upload books to Archive.org, and have uploaded a couple of items which I have, and which were not in the archive.
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Of course the first step is to scan the book. For this I use Abbyy Finereader 8.0, which drives a Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner at 400 dpi. This creates images of the pages, and all the pages in the book can be saved as a single PDF file from Finereader. For optical character recognition, I use Finereader 9.0 (which can only drive the scanner at 300 dpi or 600 dpi, curiously) which has much improved accuracy over Finereader 8.
It is necessary to create an account on Archive.org in order to upload. Then you get a button ‘Upload’, and can use this to do an upload of a PDF. This will work fine. To add extra file formats, use the instructions in the FAQ; edit the item, use the item manager, checkout the item (no download is involved in checkout), and then use an FTP interface to add more files. I was unable to get this to work in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3; but the CuteFTP programme worked fine once I disabled secure-FTP and used simple FTP.
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I added to each item a text file output, a Word document with all the formatting, and an HTML file with simple formatting only.
I would like to encourage readers to look at their shelves and consider which texts might be usefully uploaded. Every printed item prior to 1st January 1923 is out of copyright in the USA and so can go up. Copyright laws in the EU and UK require knowledge of the biography of the author, as copyright there absurdly expires 70 years after the death of the author. But union catalogues of research material like COPAC these days often indicate the birth and death date of authors, making it possible to determine status.