A special collection

It’s been a while since my last post about my job, so here’s an update on what’s been happening.

We finished going through all the books last week and started on the manuscript books. For example, I got to leaf through St. Augustine’s De civitate dei (City of God), a bound manuscript written in Northern France around A.D. 1250. Lots of the manuscripts are from the 1200s. Then there was a Wycliffe Bible from the early 1600s, just before the KJV was published. And a manuscript by Johannes Hevelius, his Catalogus Stellarum Fixarum in which he wrote out his astronomy findings.

There weren’t as many manuscript books, so we quickly finished them and have now split up; my compadre is doing manuscripts and I’m doing photographs and art and film stuff. Today I got to see Max Steiner’s original score (in pencil) of both Gone with the Wind and King Kong. (We have around 170 of his scores. And that’s only about half of what he wrote. The man was prolific.) I also went through about ten of the paintings Arnold Friberg did for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

Anyway, it’s deliciously fun and I’m absolutely loving it there. Working there is like taking a giant step back a few centuries, breathing in the same booksmell that the scribes and printers smelled, reading the marginalia. I am utterly lucky, far more blessed than I deserve.

In other news, I’ve decided to take the Welsh Book of Mormon (printed back in the mid-1800s) and digitize it. Now, Google has already scanned it in and put it up on Google Books, but what I’ll be doing is this: OCR the text, clean it up, versify it (it’s based on the first edition of the Book of Mormon and therefore the chapters are different and there aren’t any verses), write a web interface for it ala scriptures.lds.org, and then typeset it and make both the plain text and the PDF available for free on Riverglen Press. Buckets of fun. I live for texts. It’s like dessert to me. (Which is just as well, since I’ve been off sweets for the past ten or eleven months. :))

Heather applied for a job in special collections about the same time she applied in IAP. She had already started in IAP when she was contacted for the other. She came home with very mixed feelings. If things had gone the other way, she would have graduated with your class. She would not be in England now; she would not have her minor in Family History; she would have never met you and several lives would have been different.

I am happy that you are finding your job delicious. I am finding your websites delicious. I just discovered Project Gutenberg on your River Glen Press site and discovered that I have a shelf and a half of books that can be added to their collection. I was planning on making electronic copies of the books for all my children anyway. So, again, thanks!!!

Heather has found records for some of our ancestors and judging from the smile on Heather’s face as she is wading in the English Channel, I think everything worked out just the way it was supposed to.

Ben - thats the coolest thing ever. Wow! Thats all I have to say about that.

J: It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it. And Project Gutenberg is a book lover’s heaven. It’s the only place I was able to find David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, in fact. (Well, we do have a copy here at BYU, but it’s in Special Collections. And I didn’t try to ILL one in. Project Gutenberg was far more accessible than either, in any case.)

James: I know. :)

[…] I’ve decided to call this Welsh Book of Mormon digitization endeavor “Project Cymru.” (Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales.) The funny thing is that the name ends up being eerily similar to Project Cumorah, the reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon which I edited and published last August. Coincidence? ;) […]

[…] I’m digitizing the Welsh Book of Mormon (I’ve blogged about it on Top of the Mountains here and here). I’ve been chunking the text into verses (I’m in Mosiah 6 right now, 136 pages out of 483), and I’m also slowly cleaning up the OCRed text (I’m in 1 Nephi 4, I think). Pretty soon I’ll cook up a web interface for it and start uploading chapters as I finish them. And once all that’s done, I’ll import the whole thing into LaTeX and release newly typeset versions (both with verses and without). […]