Digital Curation at the Almanac Archives
To kick off the year’s blogging, I thought I would highlight one of the lesser-known SIF projects, the Almanac Archive. The Almanac Archive seeks to build a virtual collection of British almanacs published between 1750-1850. These incredibly popular texts (along with the bible one of the most likely books for any given person to read and use) are incredibly rich and diverse sources for scholarship in many fields. Designed to be useful, almanacs included a vast array of information about civic and political events (the dates of university terms, holidays and feast days, significant historical events) and the natural world (including tide tables, zodiac charts, eclipses). And used they were. One of the neat things about almanacs is that they often show signs of active use and engagement, in the form of reader annotations and marginalia, noting for instance particularly unusual weather events, which days crops were planted or harvested, and otherwise interacting with and personalizing the text. The goal of the Almanac Archive is to make a large number of these texts- and the annotations they contain — accessible to scholars in a single location. At the core of the project is building a database that will link to digitized almanacs owned by research libraries in the UK and North America, with the goal of providing digital access and finely-tuned search capabilities to negotiate and use this assemblage. The project is cool on a number of levels, but what I want to focus on here is how it … Continue reading