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Going Digital After 1300 Years

The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript so fragile it cannot be handled by the public, has been digitized by the British Library and made available to all over the Internet. DCLnews reports.

AROUND 715-720 AD, Bishop Eadfrith toiled feverishly to decorate and copy the Latin text of the Four Gospels from the New Testament of the Bible. Working alone in the Abbey at Lindisfarne, North East England, he produced an illuminated manuscript -- with colors easily rivaling the cosmopolitan Mediterranean palette -- using only a handful of locally available colors.

Little did he know that, 1300 years on, his colors would cause powerful computer software to falter in its tracks when it was used by the national British Library in London to create facsimile and electronic versions of the ancient text.

"Even Adobe PhotoShop had problems with the range of colors the artist/scribe used," explains Dr Michelle Brown, curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. "The level of subtlety is extraordinary considering the materials he was working with -- and it's as good as anything we can do today with all our computers."

The Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript (www.bl.uk) was saved from the first known Viking raid on England more than 1200 years ago and survived the upheavals of the Dark Ages and the Reformation. The priceless hand-painted manuscript, created on 259 leaves of Vellum, is now kept in a controlled environment at the British Library.

Dr Brown calls the Lindisfarne Gospels "one of the great landmarks of human cultural achievement" and "the most elaborate book ever made."

Fragile
The book may have survived the ups and downs of British history, but it is now terrifyingly fragile.

"There are several problems," Dr Brown explains. "The fabric is vellum, taken from yearling cattle, and like all animal prepared skin, it attempts to bend itself back into its organic shape. The pigment is only held on to the vellum by beaten egg white. Whenever the pigment moves it flakes."

The volume cannot be restored -- only maintained. To maximize life-expectancy, it must be locked into a high-security bubble and can only be handled very rarely by experts.

But now, thanks to technology, the book has been made available to anyone with an Internet connection. The British Library has produced a digital replica of forty pages of the Gospels. It is breathtakingly faithful to every detail (the initial difficulties with PhotoShop were quickly overcome). The dazzling range of colors, the different textures of vellum, the varying effect of oxidization, the vestiges of under-drawing through which Eadfrith planned his masterpiece -- all are immaculately rendered. You can even "turn the pages" of the manuscript, much as you would a real book.

Masters of illusion
Digitizing the Gospels was done by London-based technology firm Armadillo Systems (www.armadillosystems.com), as part of the British Library's "Turning The Page" initiative to provide public access to rare materials. But Armadillo Systems doesn't see itself as a creator of electronic books.

"What we're doing isn't really publishing," says Michael Stocking, the firm's managing director. "We might be better described as 'masters of illusion' because it's more about creating the impression of page-turning. It's a digital representation of the real thing -- a virtual exhibit."

The first versions of the Gospels were computer intensive. They were modeled using CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and, while stunning to look at, were expensive and ate a lot of memory.

"The early versions were never going to work on the Internet," explains Stocking. "So we created a new technology called TTP3D [Turning The Pages In 3D], which allows us to reduce file sizes enormously, while keeping a high degree of image quality."

Armadillo Systems scanned every page of the manuscript and built up the images from computer code to create the "page-turning" effect.

"There's no CAD modeling going on and no real 3D," continues Stocking. "We basically describe the area a page covers by its coordinates on screen, rather like map coordinates. Moving the mouse changes those coordinates, and squishes and squashes it to give the illusion that the page is turning over. That, combined with the page falling back into place if you let go of it, makes the whole thing pretty convincing."

Milestone event in British history
But for Dr. Michelle Brown making the Gospels available to the world online is a milestone event in the history of Britain.

"The Gospels, the way I read them, are an incredible statement by one very, very gifted and inspired individual to try and summarize a whole society's identity and beliefs. "They are a very beautiful way of summarizing a statement of social inclusion," she says. "And now, because the Gospels are available free on the web, they have an active dialog with people in the present - which is an historic event in itself."

DCLnews Editorial
6/24/2003

View the Lindisfarne Gospels online at www.bl.uk

The "Painted Labyrinth, The world of the Lindisfarne Gospels" exhibition opened at the British Library on May 16th and runs until September 28th. The exhibition is accompanied by a book by curator Dr. Michelle Brown which reassesses the origins, dating, and historical context of the Lindisfarne Gospels and reproduces many of the images from the facsimile. A video is also available exploring the origins of the Gospels.

Read more about technology and data conversion at DCL Library.