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The Collation

Folger Tooltips: Cover-to-Cover

19th c. wood engraving showing open books

Greetings, dear Readers

This episode of Folger Tooltips covers a variety of methods for accessing cover-to-cover page images of early printed books and bound manuscripts from the Folger collection. At the moment there are three basic ways in:

  • via Insight’s tried-and-true “Multi-page documents” (accessible once you have installed our free java client);
  • via Luna’s web-based “BookReader views” (compound digital objects represented by a single thumbnail in search results); and,
  • via what we’re calling “BookReader thumbnails” (sets of Luna search results represented by screens of thumbnails in page-by-page sort order).

So let’s get started!

Comments

As Dave Barry used to say, “The Squashed Stop Signs” sounds like the name of a rock band.

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D. — September 29, 2011

Jim, is there a way to search for all works that have been digitized cover-to-cover within the web interface for Luna? I know there must be, but I haven’t worked out what it is!

Sarah Werner — November 21, 2011

@RMW: You remind me that I have been unaccountably remiss: the *real* rock stars in all of this are our interns working on (among other worthy endeavors) the project of linking our bibliographic descriptions to digital surrogates. So let me give a shout out and thanks to this semester’s Hamnet > Luna linkers: Ashley Behringer, Rebecca Calcagno, Rebecca Hranj, Christine Parker … without whom, not! You’ll be hearing from some of them here on the Collation in the coming weeks.

@SW: Great question. You’re right: a Digital Image Database keyword phrase search on “bookreader” will only at the moment yield eight hits … while a similar search in Hamnet at the moment yields 148 hits!

How come?

The technical answer lies in the difference between a static luna url that points to a single multi-page “BookReader view” digital object (to whose metadata a searchable “bookreader” keyword can be added) … and a static luna url that points to a set of search results (a set share-able via multiple thumbnails sorted in page-by-page order, but not a set that is itself a single searchable object).

Hmm. Let me try a perhaps more useful answer: for now your most comprehensive results will be had by doing a Basic ‘Keyword Any Bib Field’ search in Hamnet for “bookreader”. Or you could do an Advanced search combining that keyword with your other keyword(s) of choice (e.g., Hamlet) using the “all of these” choice against “Keyword Any Bib Field”. … and following the links from records in the search results you end up with.

Hope this helps!

cheers,
Jim.

Jim Kuhn — November 28, 2011

[…] learn that you do!). And if you’re looking for advice on using Folger digital resources, like searching Luna and the power of permanent URLs and Mike Poston’s new tool, Impos[i]tor, the tooltips series […]

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