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XML Revives Rare Botanical Books

The Rare Book Digitization Project at New York Botanical Garden, part of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library and funded by the Mellon Foundation, is making rare and fragile tomes available to all over the Internet.

IN 1785 the French government sent Andre Michaux and his son Francois-Andre to study the forests of North America. France's forests had been ravaged by war and needed replenishing. So the Michauxs' brief was to collect botanical samples and as much information as they could find on successful forestation. Despite being attacked by armed robbers and captured by bandits, Andre Michaux produced two important works, both published in France, as a result of the trip - Flora Boreali-America (1803) and Histoire des chenes de l' Amerique (1801).

Some years later - and again commissioned by the French government (which by then had become the Republic) - Francois-Andre returned to the United States. He produced: Histoire des Arbres and Forestiers de l' Amerique Septentionale (1810-1813). These were later translated into English and published as North American Sylva (Philadelphia 1817-1819) to cater to the growing English and American markets interested in North American trees and forests.

All the Michaux titles were highly illustrated and only affordable to the monied or by libraries and institutions. The average citizen wasn't going to get a look in. Even when the New York Botanical Garden came into possession of the books many years later, they were rare and had to be treated with great care. They simply couldn't be put on regular public display or they would wear out (or get stolen).

Available to all
But now, thanks to the Internet, anyone with access to a computer or the world wide web can view them. The Rare Book Digitization Project at the New York Botanical Garden, part of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, was set up to digitize these rare works.

"Our copies are rare and fragile so this is a way to make them available to anyone wanting to use them for research projects or personal study," says Heather Rolen, Library Digitization Specialist at the New York Botanical Garden. "People find the plates stunning, which underlines the sheer craftsmanship that went into creating the illustrations."

That kind of craftsmanship is no longer needed in the book publishing industry. The expertize today revolves around technology, both in the production process and also when it comes to turning aging tomes into electronic format for viewing over the Internet.

Power of XML
Indeed, converting the Michaux books from paper to bytes was no easy task. A great deal of sophisticated scanning and digital imaging was needed to capture the illustrations accurately. Once that was done, the illustrations and text needed to be marked up with XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which allows material to be easily changed or deployed to other formats.

"XML is a robust language that has many advantages," explains Rolen. "It is unlikely to go out of date soon and it doesn't limit your text output to the Internet - you can literally publish your data on many electronic devices."

The team at the Rare Book Digitization Project also chose XML because they wanted to use its extensibility to be able to identify whenever a genus or species was named. This would allow more sophisticated searching of the digitized titles.

"People identify botanicals by different scientific and common names depending on what part of the country or the world they live in," Rolen continues. "Tagging the material in XML means that when a search is run, even on an obscure name, the correct genus or species will be displayed because the additional scientific and common names for it have been included in the underlying code."

DCL converts files to XML
Data Conversion Laboratory Inc. (DCL) was brought in to convert the material to XML. "Every single word was double-keyed for accuracy [i.e. two typists typed up the same material and software analyzed the result, making for precise conversion]," explains Rolen. "DCL then made sure the XML was valid and that the tags were properly identified. You need that level of precision if electronic versions of rare books are to be seen as viable alternatives to printed facsimile versions."

Janet Feld, the project manager at DCL who organized the conversion of the Michaux material, says converting rare books into electronic format is a growing movement and is a field DCL are very much involved in: "Many leading libraries and museums in the world are making their special collections available electronically, either over the Internet or on CD-ROM. That means both specialists and lay people alike benefit from getting access to the information - access they would not easily have had previously. Special credit goes to bodies like the Mellon Foundation, who are funding such projects."

Feld goes on to say that the use of the computer markup language XML (eXtensible Markup Language) means that libraries' and museums' investment in digitization will be a lasting one. "XML lets you expand to meet the requirements of future technologies. For example, material can easily be adapted and published in e-book or smart mobile phone formats," she says.

Multi-media tour
Funding for the Michaux project came from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who are backing a number of similar digitization projects. Depending on whether they can get further funding from the Mellon Foundation or elsewhere, the Rare Book Digitization Project has very definite plans for the future.

"We hope to soon make our digital titles available as e-books on handheld computers - even on smart mobile phones," says Rolen. "From the tourist point-of-view, we would look at giving visitors to the gardens a portable device so they can access the catalog as they walk round. They could call up the information, pictures, and diagrams associated with the species they are looking at. And they could choose how extensive they want that information to be. All in all, it would make visiting the New York Botanical Garden a unique multi-media experience."

4/29/2003
DCLnews Editorial

Read more about technology and data conversion at DCL Library.