Manuscripts of America in the Royal Spanish Collections: A Joint Digitization Project with the Library of
the Royal Palace of Spain 1. Introduction
With an aim of bringing cultural contents to cyberspace and spreading some unknown aspects of the history of the Americas, the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library has embarked in a joint effort with the Library of the Royal Palace of Spain, to develop the digital web publication of the
Manuscripts of the Americas in the Royal
Collections funds. In this joint venture, the Library of Royal Palace supplied its invaluable contents for digitization, and the Miguel de Cervantes DL its technology and experience as a digital publisher. The goal was to join the ancient and the new, the most precious and carefully preserved documents with the new electronic publishing technologies. The result was to make freely available to a worldwide public those otherwise unreachable treasures of the Royal Collections. We expected this effort to have an impact both on the general reader and on the specialized researcher. In both cases they would be spared the time and cost of a trip to Madrid, and the risk of an access denial. In
With a long term vision we set high level quality requirements to obtain accurate digital facsimiles of the originals not only for the present state of the art of web technology but for future higher standard of graphic display. With an innovative spirit we applied the best available technology at the service of culture.
2. The library of the royal palace
The Library of the Royal Palace of Spain has its origins in the private libraries of the kings of the House of Borbones. In the National Patrimony collections, which include the Library of the Royal Palace, we can find unique editions, rare books, incunabula, manuscripts, old printings, ancient maps, musical scores, drawings, engravings, rare book bindings, coins, tapestry, furniture and much more. Most of the Manuscripts of the Americas collection comprises manuscripts of the 17th and 18th centuries, the kings' letters, royal credentials, royal bans, etc., all of great historical and cultural value: a wide and valuable testimonial set of the American colonial period.
3. Some technical details of the project
We started building this digital collection in two parallel fronts. On one hand, cataloguing the funds, and on the other hand, digitizing them. For cataloging, we defined an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) mark-up scheme based on the Master guidelines (Burnard and Robinson, 1999), and developed our own software for the automatic transformation of catalogue records to nicely formatted HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for web publication.
The digitization of the funds was partially done by the Miguel de Cervantes DL, and partially assigned to a private company that followed our quality standards.
After digitization was done, partially-automated digital image processing was applied to the top quality big-size preservation images to obtain both thumb-nail images to create graphical indexes and medium-size medium-quality images for adequate web transmission and display on nowadays screens. In this process, high quality TIFF images were converted to lower quality JPEG ones. Let’s remember that the JPEG format offers a high level of compression for higher speed transmission but with some loss of quality.