Digitising the Wren Library

Through the James Catalogue Online, our Library Catalogue, and our Archives Management System, we currently offer 5,472 individual manuscripts, letters, documents, and printed books, online, in full, and free of charge – an increase of 816 items in the last nine months alone, including 33 new medieval manuscripts.

Our efforts have been rewarded: The James Catalogue of medieval manuscripts had a record year with 13,000 unique visitors, an increase of 23.5% from the previous year, 1500 of which visited our site in the last month alone. Our users come from 109 countries across the globe and have consulted our online catalogue 173,000 times this year, viewing the records of 1473 unique manuscripts. Of the 1720 records on the James Catalogue Online, there are 565 manuscripts that currently lack digital images, all of which we hope to be able to capture and present online in the coming years.

Beyond the James Catalogue – the only site for which I am able to capture analytics – we’ve also started engaging more fully with our printed books. This year we’ve captured Thomas Cromwell’s personal Book of Hours (C.30.9), at a high enough resolution to see the silver hallmarks pressed into its binding (see last year’s Fountain for a description of this book), and a copy of Galileo’s Difesa (T.3.134), signed and presented by the author himself to a dear friend. As part of a new initiative, we’ve begun digitising the items from our printed collections of which we hold the only extant copy. At the time of writing, I’m pleased to confirm that the first two unique incunabula, both printed in Paris, around the year 1500, are now online (VI.13.169 & VI.13.171).

Similarly, our digitised modern manuscripts are linked to the archives catalogue. In simply digitising a single box we now can showcase letters and correspondence by founding members of the Royal Society (Edmund Halley, Isaac Newton, and Robert Hooke), a geologist who is also a priest (Adam Sedgwick), a mathematician who is also a philosopher (Bertrand Russell), a Lord Protector (Oliver Cromwell), and a naval officer (Horatio Nelson).

Beyond the library, this year has also seen us engage with the wider scholarly and academic communities within and beyond Cambridge. We have taken part in the University Library’s Curious Cures exhibition*, a Wellcome Trust funded project to study medieval medical recipes, and, alongside the Royal Society, provided images of the Herschel family’s correspondence as they seek to understand their own collection more holistically. For the first time this year, we also experimented with imaging in more than two dimensions: working with researchers from the University of Aberdeen to capture one of our cuneiform tablets using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) – a process in which raking light images are digitally aligned to allow the viewer to explore the surface of an object in an entirely new way.

The next few months will see us rebuild, test and release a new technical architecture to underpin the Digital Library, sitting behind a new front-end platform that will allow us to bring together the collections of our digitised medieval and modern manuscripts, along with our digitised print holdings and search them together – erasing the divisions within our digital collections and allowing researchers and visitors to seamlessly search all of Trinity’s Digital Library. However, this update not only represents an improvement for our users, but also for the functionality, security and sustainability of all of our digital holdings, as well as the creation of a platform with the ability to adapt to the challenges that new digital initiatives will bring.

While we’ve focused our efforts previously on digitising our western holdings, the Wren Library also is host to world-renowned collections of Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chinese, Persian, Sanskrit, Shan, Slavonic, and Urdu print and manuscript material. The new platform architecture provides support for non-western languages, and reading directions from right to left and vertically. Engaging with our non-western collections also serves to provide an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the collections themselves, as specialist conservators and cataloguers bring their knowledge and expertise to preserve these objects and build upon the records of them that we already hold – most of which date from the end of the 19th century, if they even exist at all.

So, after 12 years of dedicated work, innovation, discovery, and delivery, with regard to the Wren Digital Library and the vast wealth of the Library and Archival collection, there is no shortage of work to do, no shortage of scholarship to support, and no shortage of discoveries to be made. We will continue to work to share our collections in new ways to serve researchers and visitors alike, no matter where in the world they may be.