At the 2012 Charleston Conference, Associate Publisher Ray Abruzzi, accompanied by Simon Bell, Head of Strategic Partnerships & Licensing, The British Library and Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing, The National Archives, UK, provided background and insight into the strategy and creation of the Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

1. Climbing the Digital Everest:
The Journey to Digitize the
Nineteenth Century
2012 Charleston Conference

2. Speakers
• Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing, The National Archives, UK
• Simon Bell, Head of Strategic Partnerships & Licensing, The British Library
• Ray Abruzzi, Director of Strategic Planning, Gale | Cengage Learning

3. Discussion Agenda
Introduction
• Gale’s Approach to “Digitizing the Nineteenth Century”—
• Collections and Content—provide the mountain
• Researchers and Students—provide the reason
• Negotiating the Terrain
• Advisors/Sherpa
• What’s in Gale’s Backpack:
• Technology—Ropes and Crampons
• Partners
• Flags on the Summit
• The View from the British Library
• The View from The National Archives

4. Sizing up the Mountain: how do the centuries compare?
Book publishing Book publishing
in 18C UK in 19C UK
(ECCO) (based on NSTC and BL estimates)
185K titles 1M+ titles
~ 33M pages ~ 315M pages
Book publishing
Book publishing in 19C USA
in 18C USA (est. based on NSTC and S-S)
(Evans)
33,000 titles 360K titles
~ 2M pages ~ 100M pages
As well as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and
other documents…….
4

5. Why NCCO?—”Because it was there…”
• After releasing ECCO many of our customers asked us, “When will you do
the same thing for the 19th century?”
• But what did that really mean?
• The NSTC isn’t comprehensive in the same sense as the ESTC
• Printing (along with literacy rates) exploded during the 19th century
• Beyond the publishing world, shipping, railroads, and other
improvements in transportation and communication created a more inter-
connected world, commercially and politically, but also in an academic
sense

6. More Climbers
Twice as many faculty specialize in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth,
indicating a greater need for institutional investment in teaching and research:
19th Century vs. 18th Century Faculty (US)
Category 18th C 19th C 19C/18C Factor
American Studies 1,523 2,393 157%
British Studies 794 2,356 297%
Source: MDR’s
Other Disciplines 351 1,448 413% College Universe
TOTAL 2,668 6,197 232%
Similarly, there is significantly greater scholarly output on the nineteenth
century than on the eighteenth century :
Scholarly Publishing through 2010: Academic Articles Source: Chicago
18th C Articles 19th C Articles 19C/18C Factor Journals/JSTOR
12,564 21,937 167%
6

7. User-Driven Product Design-The Climbers

8. Many paths to
the summit

9. Global Advisors--The Guides
George Mallory (upper left) and Sherpas on Everest, 1922

11. Global Advisory Board
• John Merriman, Charles Seymour • Dominique Kalifa, Professor at the
Professor of History, Yale University of Paris 1 Pantheon-
University Sorbonne, Head of the Doctoral
School of History and Director,
• Dr. H.K. Kaul, Director, DELNET,
Centre of 19th Century History
India (ad hoc role)
• Tatiana Holway, Independent
• Joris Van Eijnatten, Professor of
Scholar, Author, Researcher, and
Cultural History, Chair of the
Editor, specializing in 19th-century
section ‘History of Culture,
social sciences
Mentalities and Ideas since 1500’,
Utrecht University, Department of • Damon Jaggars, Associate
History and Art History University Librarian, Columbia
University Libraries
• Hilary Fraser, Geoffrey Tillotson
Professor in Nineteenth-Century • Jerome McGann, Professor of
Studies, Birkbeck University of English, University of Virginia,
London: Founder and Director of NINES

12. Global Advisory Board
• Kathleen Banks Nutter, Archivist,
Smith College
• John Wright, Director, Arts &
Culture, Libraries and Cultural
Resources, University of Calgary
• William Miller, Dean of University
Libraries, Florida Atlantic
University
Edmund Hillary and his guide,
Tenzing Norgay

13. Subject Matter Experts for NCCO Archives 2013 (5-8)—Local Knowledge
Science, Technology, and Medicine Photography: The World through the
• Dan Lewis, Ph.D., Dibner Senior Curator
Lens
of the History of Science & Technology, • Professor Elizabeth Edwards, De
The Huntington Library, Art Collections Montfort University, Research
& Botanical Gardens Professor in Photographic History and
Director of Photographic History
Research Centre
Europe and Africa: Commerce,
Women: Transnational Networks
Christianity, Civilization, and
Conquest • Kathleen Banks Nutter, Archivist, Smith
College
• Charlie Reed, History Department,
ECSU
• Richard N. Price, History Department,
Univ of Maryland

14. 14

15. Gale’s Backpack

16. Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale
Technology: Vendor relationships, state-of-the-art scanners and OCR
engines, proprietary quality assurance processes, and an Agile
development methodology.

17. Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale
Expertise
• Working with over 300 libraries and institutions both large and small, Gale has curated and published
over 250 archival products and collections spanning over 900 years of history

18. Backpack: Technology, Expertise, and Scale
Scale
• Gale has digitized and made searchable/discoverable over 130 million pages of primary
sources, ranging from Medieval manuscripts to the archive of the Financial Times:

19. 19
19

20. Backpack: Crampons
Head notes contextualize
the collections for
undergraduates and
researchers, providing
information on:
• provenance and
arrangement of the
material;
• the topics and events
which the content
describes; and
• some of the key areas
of research that might
be explored using the
materials

21. Backpack: Climbing Ropes
• Textual Analysis
tools enable
researchers to
discover
connections
between
documents,
events,
movements, and
people.

22. Climbing Routes: Tags and Annotations
• Named-user
features allow
researchers to
tag and
annotate
content,
guiding
students and
like-minded
researchers to
documents
and building
on collective
knowledge.

23. Shared Accounts—Never Climb Alone
• Students and
Faculty can create
and share accounts
for class-wide
instruction or for
specific study
groups/projects
• Researchers can
also work together
on joint projects
across locations

24. Flags at the Summit--List of current NCCO partners
• British Library • Canterbury Christ Church University
• Library of Congress • Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• U.S. National Archives • Royal Collection, Windsor
• The National Archives (UK) • National Portrait Gallery, London
• Cornell University Libraries • Huntington Library
• Bodleian Library, University of Oxford • Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester
• General Commission on Archives and History, United • National Library of Medicine, NIH, Bethesda, MD
Methodist Church
• Library of the Society of Friends
• London Metropolitan Archives
• Divinity School Library, Yale University
• Manchester Statistical Society
• International Museum of Photography
• World Microfilms
• George Eastman House
• Pusey House Library, St. Giles
• London School of Economics and Political Science
• Working Class Movement Library Library

25. A View from the Summit—The British Library

26. A View from the Peak—The British Library
Digitising the 19th Century – overview:
• No comprehensive catalogue for the 19th Century, unlike ESTC for early printed material
(up to 18th Century)
• Explosion in publishing output in 19th Century
• Vast holdings of 19th Century material in the BL, but many of them are also held in other
libraries in the UK and in the US
 What has already been digitised (e.g. Google Books/Hathi Trust etc.)
 What is unique?
 What has scholarly/research value?
 How can we add value/bring collections together?
 Who are the other partners –
 what do they have which complements our holdings?

27. A View from the Peak—The British Library
Digitising the 19th Century – challenges:
• What do we have? Focus on unique material of scholarly value (lots of manuscript
material)
• What metadata is available and to what level of granularity?
• Manuscript material – condition/preservation checking – all material unique, no uniformity
in terms of size, condition etc – a challenge for workflows
• Setting up digitisation studio – conservation training, material handling, throughput
• Managing the workflows – balancing conservation/repair etc with a desire to make material
accessible in the shortest possible timeframe

28. A View from the Peak—The British Library
NCCO – Benefits for the British Library
• Increased access to collection globally
• Metadata creation for collection – aids discovery
• Conservation and preservation of key British Library manuscripts
• Increased scholarship as cross-searchable with other BL collections as well as those from
other institutions, particularly the National Archive
• New methods of scholarship – value adds of NCCO (e.g. tags and annotations etc.)
• Digital images for the British Library
• Fits the BL’s 2020 Vision

29. A View from the Summit—The National Archives

30. Archives and Libraries in one collection
Archival Sources Library Collections
First drafts of history Published, considered analysis
Real-time Hindsight
Mostly manuscript or visual – transcribe Print - OCR
Both – posters, illustrations,
ephemera

32. Midget Prince Mignon (Gerrit Keizer) 1891 COPY 1/405/71
32

33. The Rocket Locomotive, 1881 (COPY 1/53/434)
33

34. Q&A—and Conversation

35. Thank you!
Ray Abruzzi, Director, Strategic Planning
Ray.abruzzi@cengage.com
NCCO
http://gdc.gale.com/nineteenth-century-collections-online/