There is the Centre of the Study of the Book that, at the moment, house the page of Blockbooks, creating a page with series of other pages linked to collections.
The idea is to create a web presence for Blockbooks, and maybe other collections in a central area. Image collections at the moment are in LUNA and a few ideas for the project came to life:
- central page for 4 collections: Early printing in Europe (blockbooks), Oriental collection, Greek collection and Medieval collection
- transcription of the text in each image so the user can view the text in its original language and the English transcription simultaneously
- a geographical mapping of the collections pin-pointing where and when they occur
The zoomify tool is provided by Luna. There are a few complex descriptions (created in PDF) that will be linked from the website as needed.
Examples of LUNA implementation outside University: David Rumsey and NASA images.
Development
At the moment I created an initial website idea for the Blockbooks and it will evolve including the new collections as possible. The page can be found at http://www.odl.ox.ac.uk/digitalimagelibrary/
Update [Feb 2011]: the final (and modified version) of Blockbooks now is a complete image library and hold more items. However, I still prefer my initial design… http://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
One of the possibilities of the pin-pointing time and place that the manuscripts were created will be created using the timemap code and a similar idea of what I’m planning for the geographical mapping is here.
Blockbooks on trac system: http://damssupport.ouls.ox.ac.uk/trac/blockbooks/ (internal to University of Oxford only)
Dorothy Little can point me to the correct Bodleian logo direction.