BOOKS, AS MOVABLE objects (of any material) provided with surfaces on which to store and deliver information, are a technology that has evolved, taking different forms and shapes with its progress. From clay, bone, and wooden tablets, to cloth and bark-paper folded concertinas, papyrus scrolls, and parchment and paper codices, books have been part of our culture for millennia.

When we think of the physical aspects of books, as empirically demonstrated by an image search on the web for the keyword “book,” typically we expect to see a book in its codex form, as this is the form with which we are nowadays most familiar, to the point that we simply call them books. Books in codex format are defined as “a collection of sheets of any material, folded double and fastened together at the back or spine, and usually protected by covers.” Despite the variations due to different historical and geographical traditions, codices are characterized by their inner working structure, which has yielded the success of this format: their pages (generally arranged in gatherings) are linked together at the spine, allowing for quick and easy browsing of the content.

The Book as a Black Box

Although often collected exclusively for their content and decoration, books, as cultural objects, present the added value of technological and material data, preserved from another time and place. Like other tools and objects that are readily handled in our everyday life, books are, however, used “unconsciously” and few actually consider— or even notice— their physical form beyond the fact that they work as they are supposed to: they convey information. In order to read a physical book, one does not need any knowledge of bookbinding.

In this sense, to borrow a concept from information science and actor– network theories (ANT), books in codex format are, to the typical user, black boxes. A black box, in these terms, is a technological artifact that, while appearing obvious to the ordinary observer— in the sense that its behaviour is perceived “as known and predicted independently of its context”— can also be regarded as a complex entity, the essence of which depends on a diverse system of techniques, materials, processes, and actions.

THE SUCCESSFUL TRANSMEDIATION of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures that have what may sometimes appear as conflicting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for the future generations— conservators and curators— and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data— digitization professionals, and then digital humanists. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate, and when the current literature addresses both groups, it does so strictly within technical reports and guidelines, concentrating on procedures and optimal workflow, standards, and technical metadata. In particular, more often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product, and this leads to misunderstanding and clashes of interests.

Digitization projects have become increasingly crucial for memory institutions and cultural heritage in general and have been at the core of the field of digital humanities from its beginnings, inevitably with a profound influence on conservation practice since the early 2000s. Here, as hinted at in the title, we will be concerned with the digitization of books and documents. All the fields involved in this diverse practice landscape, besides the specifics included in technical manuals in regard with best-practice procedures, have largely distinct authorship and readerships that do not overlap. This book tries to fill this gap. It strives to do so by showcasing, on the one hand, the need to understand the informational content of books as objects and the role that conservators could have in the creation of broader digital products and tools, and, on the other, the transformative and transcendent value that digital surrogates can and should bring to the table.

THE LIBRARY at Wellcome Collection in London holds an important and distinctive collection of medieval Western manuscripts in Latin, Greek, and vernacular languages related to medicine and health. The collection, of parchment and paper items, includes not only bound codices but also unbound documents, folding calendars, and scrolls. The subject material ranges from theoretical medical texts and compendia of information about plants and animals, to works on alchemy, astrology, and magic, as well as collections of recipes and healing charms. This reflects the breadth of the understanding and practice of medicine in the Middle Ages: information about the natural world, magic, and astrology informed thinking about the human body and enabled medical practitioners to diagnose, prognosticate, and administer treatments.

The Library has approximately 335 Western manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. In 2014, as part of its wider digitization program, the Library started digitizing this collection, aiming to digitize all manuscripts that were sufficiently robust to be imaged. The project is currently ongoing. The digitized manuscripts, freely accessible online, are creating a rich and detailed resource for historical researchers, conservators, heritage scientists, and others who are interested in these remarkable objects. Before digitization commenced, an item-by-item conservation survey of the collection was carried out to assess the suitability of each manuscript for digitization, especially with respect to its overall condition and the opening angles permitted by its binding. Pre-digitization surveys were subsequently standardized by the library digitization support team, and this project was in many ways a pioneering exemplar for special collections digitization at Wellcome Collection. This chapter will discuss the curatorial context for the digitization project, the pre-digitization survey, the post-digitization preservation and conservation work, and the research potential of the project.

Curatorial Context

Prior to digitization, work was undertaken to develop the framework within which the digitized manuscripts would be hosted. The platform for hosting digital content, now called the viewer, was at this time known as the player. The Library's medieval and early modern specialist worked with colleagues in the digital team to formulate a list of required enhancements to Goobi, the back-end system for ingesting and processing the images that appear in the viewer.

DIGITIZATION PROGRAMS ARE now commonplace throughout the cultural and heritage sector. However, moving away from routine digitization, there are opportunities in using advanced imaging capture methods in the computational sciences to analyze primary historical sources. This relationship can be dependent on conservators and conservation science to provide insight and access, and prioritize issues through highlighting how and why particular documents or artifacts may benefit from an advanced imaging approach— for example, with the virtual flattening of the damaged Great Parchment Book. In addition, imaging scientists can develop best practices for the application of computational technologies within the cultural and heritage space— for instance, to allow more efficient use of multispectral imaging to reduce the time and cost of capture for particular conservation applications, such as the identification of pigments. This chapter reflects on my twenty years researching and teaching digitization technologies in cultural heritage and developing advanced interdisciplinary projects that require teams with wide-ranging expertise, indicating both the benefits and issues that may arise when attempting to undertake advanced imaging of cultural heritage objects, and stressing the role of the digital humanist, or the heritage scientist, in bridging disciplinary divides. It is hoped that by doing so the type of research success that can emerge when links are forged between the conservation and advanced digitization communities can be demonstrated, and, in addition, others can be encouraged to build links that use advanced digital imaging as a research approach.

Digital Imaging and Cultural Heritage: A Personal Journey

I first saw digitization technologies in action in 1993. A friend's uncle demonstrated an early portable scanner while digitizing family photo albums. With a mind duly blown, I hunted out facilities at the University of Glasgow, where I had recently started my undergraduate degree in History of Art and English Literature. My flatmate, studying Physics, introduced me to the World Wide Web just as it was accelerating, and I rapidly became an avid user of Usenet alt.rec groups and GeoCities, on slow, bulky public University Library computers that heralded a networked, utopian future. Manually updated, lovingly curated websites such as Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle and Ross Scaife's Diotima indicated how digital cultural heritage would fit into this new digital world order.

MULTISPECTRAL IMAGING HAS proven to be a critical tool for the study of unseen ancient texts, sketches, and other features in cultural heritage objects. For decades libraries and museums have used non-visible light to examine manuscripts and paintings. Multispectral imaging captures data across a significant part of the electromagnetic spectrum, including light from frequencies beyond the visible light range. This imaging enables extraction of additional information that the human eye fails to capture. It was originally developed for space-based imaging and surveillance to penetrate foliage, clouds, and camouflage, and for astronomy to study celestial objects. Following a decade and a half of development for cultural heritage projects, this same technology is now being used to enhance unseen features on fragile cultural heritage objects.

To conduct narrowband multispectral imaging, multiple images of an object are taken at different wavelengths of light, resulting in a digital “stack” or “cube” of images. Computer algorithms are then used to digitally combine images and enhance particular characteristics of the imaged area through computer processing. These processed images can reveal the faint traces of erased undertext, artifacts such as erasures and changes, and residues and areas of concern for preservation. This is particularly useful to reveal texts on palimpsests, an early form of recycling parchment when fresh parchment was not available. Words previously written on parchment folios were scraped off and erased with pumice stone and acidic solutions and then written over with iron gall ink. Narrowband multispectral imaging of palimpsests and other objects in different institutions and projects have provided conservators with a wealth of information, but with varied conservation support for the actual multispectral imaging and use of the resulting images.

Fortunately, one of the pioneering cultural heritage narrowband multispectral imaging programs incorporated close collaboration with conservation professionals from the beginning to ensure the safe preparation and imaging of the object. The Archimedes Palimpsest Program incorporated best practices in conservation throughout its program planning, work processes, and development of the narrowband illumination. This then carried over to many subsequent imaging projects, setting the standard for multispectral imaging work processes geared toward appropriate handling and exposure of fragile materials in accordance with conservation guidelines.

ON THE NIGHT of September 2, 2018, the National Museum of Brazil was destroyed by a tragic fire. Wired Magazine commented on the fact stating that “all those artifacts could have been systematically backed up over the years with photographs, scans” and continued stating that “the academic community has not yet fully embraced the importance of archiving,” causing an uproar on the Twittersphere because of the naïvety of such an accusation. The costs of mass digitization of all human culture are naturally prohibitive, given the time that would take, the funds needed for the reformatting process, and the maintenance of the digital data. Moreover, this also assumes that digitization is the creation of sorts of virtual clones of the original items that can be backed up on the cloud, like the photographs taken on mobile phones. To digitize is not to replicate an artifact in all its nature, and, as well understood by most today, digitization does not equal preservation.

Digitization does, however, capture information and create additional data sources that integrate (and transcend) the originals. These become supplementary objects of study that scholars can use in tandem with the object they capture, in turn informing research and work on the latter. On April 15, 2019, a fire beneath the roof of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris destroyed the covering and the spire, damaging the windows and the vaulted ceiling of the medieval church. In 2010, however, the late Andrew Tallon, art professor at Vassar College (New York), aided by Paul S. Blaer, senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, painstakingly captured the whole architectural structure, piece by piece, inside and outside, with a laser scanner (Leica ScanStation C10), collecting over one billion data points, accounting for around one terabyte of data. John Ochsendorf, structural engineer and historian of construction, with an interest in masonry mechanics, has described the data collected by Tallon and Blaer as essential to understanding the built geometry of the structure and for its reconstruction. Drawings and diagrams, in fact, would not capture all the imperfections and are not as accurate as laser scans, with their millimetric precision.

THE GREAT PARCHMENT Book project represents a very good example of a successful relationship between different disciplines and professions. The research brought together archivists, a paleographer, and conservators from London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) and experts in digital technologies from the University College London (UCL) Department of Computer Science and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. This joint effort supported a four-year Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in the UCL Virtual Environments, Imaging, and Visualization program funded by the Engineering and Physical Research Council and LMA. The conservation work was funded by the National Manuscript Conservation Trust.

The aim was to create a digital copy that revealed the content of a manuscript where the text was illegible due to its fragile physical condition. The book (LMA reference CLA/ 049/ EM/ 02/ 018) was unavailable for access due to the extreme fragility of its support. Traditional conservation alone could not reinstate the document in an acceptable and safe condition to enable it to be handled. Only the work of the UCL digitization team revealed the very useful information that the document held.

Today the volume is available for access online without the need to retrieve and handle the document unnecessarily.

Historical Background

The Great Parchment Book owned by the Honourable The Irish Society was commissioned in 1639 by Charles I with the aim to survey all the estates in Derry∼Londonderry managed by the City of London through The Irish Society and the City of London livery companies. This survey was compiled at a time of great political and social change and provides important information about the role of the City of London in the Protestant colonization and administration of Ulster as well as the population.

Since 1639 the book has been held in London. In February 1786, a fire in the Chamber of London at the Guildhall in the City of London destroyed most of the early records of The Irish Society, and only very few of the seventeenth-century documents remained. Among those which survived is the Great Parchment Book.

The volume was severely damaged by fire and subsequently by water. The volume was so distorted and fragile that for over 200 years it was unavailable for research.

SINCE 2008, WITH six years of major funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and assistance from a private donor, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has been creating full digital surrogates of its illuminated manuscripts and rare books and making them available online for unrestricted use under a Creative Commons CC0 licence. We are now almost halfway through the collection of nearly 1,000 codices, and single leaves. Images of our manuscripts are being used by scholars around the world for research and publication and by the public for a wide variety of applications. From its inception this ambitious undertaking has been a collaboration between the Walters Book and Paper Conservation Laboratory, the Digitization Studio, and the Manuscript and Rare Book department. The Walters Art Museum is proud to have the third-oldest conservation department in the country and the preservation of the collections is included as part of our mission. Conservators from the Book and Paper Lab have been involved from the outset of the manuscript digitization program to ensure that these inherently fragile objects would be stable enough to be handled and photographed, and that no damage would occur during the digitization process.

The idea of digitizing the manuscript collection originated with former curator Will Noel, who was hired in 1997. He was determined to expose “as many people to the art of the book as possible” by making the Walters illuminated manuscripts, one of the best collections of manuscripts in the country, accessible by displaying them throughout the museum and in international loan exhibitions, and by putting them on CD-ROM so that they would be available to all. Ten years later, major advances had been made in the digital cataloguing of the manuscript collection, and the museum was gradually moving in the same direction. Inspired by these developments, Will conceived of a three-year project to digitally photograph the illuminated folios of all of the manuscripts and to put the estimated 20,000 images online, along with the digital data, for use by scholars and the general public. However, in the summer of 2007, he learned of specialized equipment that would make it possible for an entire manuscript to be digitized from cover to cover.

HISTORICAL BOOKS HELD in memory institutions are likely to undergo conservation treatments that could alter, or even destroy, material evidence, to preserve their function as content-delivering tools. For this reason, bookbinders— formerly, aside from amateurs, the sole practitioners of restoration and conservation treatments in the past— are mentioned alongside fire, water, neglect, collectors (and servants and children!) in the well-known nineteenth-century book by William Blades, The Enemies of Books.

Blades laments, in particular, the destruction of old bindings by the hand of careless bookbinders, for “everything which diminishes the interest of a book is inimical to its preservation, and in fact is its enemy.” Then, in an unusually illuminated judgment for his times, he stresses how “old covers, whether boards or paper, should always be retained if in any state approaching decency.” This has also the great advantage of not depriving the future generations “of the opportunity of seeing for themselves exactly in what dress the book buyers of four centuries ago received their volumes.”

At the core of the destruction of old bindings and the damaging of old books (also through the application, mostly for aesthetic reasons, of bleach and other harsh chemicals) lies the focus on making them usable and the ignorance of the history of each volume. In essence, this is equal to the incapability of putting each material element of the object in relation to the context, history, and significance of the book as a whole, in an effort to interpret the data and reveal the meaning of each object, as emphasized in the model offered in the previous chapter.