Creation of a partial Facsimile of the records of Galway Corporation by use of the statute book Liber A

Objective

The objects of digitization for this project are the records of Galway Corporation, which in their entirety cover the time period from its foundation in 1485 to 1818. It consists of a statute book (Liber A) giving the names of members of the Corporation and statutes passed (1485 to 1710) as well as the minute books of meetings of the Corporation from 1679, giving the dates of meetings, attendance and business transacted. There is also some loose legal material relating to a court case before the House of Lords dealing with the election of Valentine Blake as MP for Galway in 1814.

To limit the dimension of the Project, it will concentrate on a selected section of Liber A volume, namely the timespan 1600-1625, which includes folio 114 – folio 143b. The main part of the project will involve analyzing the necessary steps in order to create a facsimile from scanning the original folios up to the finalized steps in the visual representation of the finished webpage and interface. These steps will then be documented and outlined in order to ensure a structured, process-oriented approach for the continuation and future completion of the entire project after it was taken over.

Methods

The original folios from the selected part of Liber A will be selected, scanned, processed and edited. Additionally, the folio transcripts will be scanned and digitized via OCR. Subsequently, the development of TEI- guidelines will take place according to which the digitized transcripts will be TEI- encoded, in order to ensure good practices. The folio-images and their corresponding TEI-files will then be fed into and presented by juxtaposition in an Omeka-based database with TEIDisplay- support, provided by a plugin developed by Scholars’ Lab (http://www.scholarslab.org/). The Interface will allow for easy addition of newly scanned and encoded objects, as well as an easy expansion for volumes still to be added. It will also allow optional integration of additional media in separate collections such as related documents, sound files, videos, images etc. without disrupting the original structure in case an expansion of the collection is desired in the future. Finally, all of the steps will be documented and explained in detail with accurate specifications in order to create a structured workflow for the entire process, to guarantee a standardized work process and to ensure a seamless transfer of the project to a successive supervisor.

Schedule

• January-February: Digitization of the primary source and OCR of the transcript
• March-April: conceptualization of the database, creation of Coding Guidelines for good practices, TEI-encoding
• April-May: Integration of the data into an Omeka-based database with TEI-support, visual design and creation of a workflow for the entire process