National Library of Australia


Treasures of the State Library - the Antiphonal

Project participants: State Library of South Australia
Contact officer/s: Peter Jenkins, Manager Preservation Services. (email Jenkins.Peter@slsa.sa.gov.au, phone 08 8207 7315 or fax 08 8207 7354)
Project description: A 1998 project to stabilize and conserve the work led to high resolution photograhic digitisation of the entire 360 page vellum, 13th century Italian work and storage on compact disc. This has made it possible to make the whole manuscript and selected parts of the live performance of the Antiphonal accessible in virtual reality through a computer, and to release it on the Internet complete with transcription, translation and notes. It is now both far more widely accessible, and also more protected.
URL of site: http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/treasures/antiphonal/index.html
URL for project information: http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/treasures/antiphonal/information.htm
Content: 730 Web pages. One series of 359 contain images of individual pages of the Antiphonal combined with a transcription of the original Latin whilst another series of 359 provide images and an English translation of the text. Additional pages provide such information as the history and perceived highlights of the Antiphonal. Sound recordings and handwritten material.
Digitisation policy and priorities: http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/library/2020.htm
Timetable: Completed. April 1996 - February 1998
Budget and funding: Funded internally - $A20,000 - $A50,000.
Staff resources: Digitisation process outsourced to Bridgehead Australia Pty Ltd.
Technical standards: Image Masters: Kodak Photo CD Images on Web site: JPEG images approximately 290x420 pixels. Capturing: Kodak professional Photo CD Image preparation for website: Adobe Photoshop. Kodak Photo CD imaging workshop and Kodak Photo CD. When Photo CDs become obsolete, we will transfer image files to whatever is then suitable accepted standard.
Cataloguing and indexing: Page number sequence only.
Comments: When we started photographing the Antiphonal we hadn't thought of the Web site as an end product. As a general lesson, there is often more than one alternative way of doing things, and the best one is determined by the end product. The conversion of the Photo CD format into JPEGs was time consuming.

Project managers wishing to update the details of their Australian digitisation projects, should email the changes to alg@nla.gov.au.

Last modified: August 09 2004.