About the Project
History of the Project
Methodology and Standards
Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters will ultimately present digitally all surviving correspondence of Romantic poet, writer, and editor Leigh Hunt (1784-1859).
The project has several phases. The first, which is currently underway, brings together digitally the 1,600 letters in the Brewer-Hunt Collection and previous cataloging at Iowa with unpublished transcripts made by David R. Cheney and held by The University of Toledo Libraries. We have also begun adding transcripts by other scholars to the database, including work from Eleanore M. Gates, author of Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters and Brent Kinser of the Carlyle Letters Online Project. Further contributors will be welcomed in the future.
The second phase will add information collected by Cheney about letters in other repositories and published in other, incomplete, editions of Hunt’s letters. We have already begun to make preliminary contact with a few other institutions and soon expect to begin adding images from other libraries to the collection. Following completion of phase I of the project, we will begin more intensive efforts to secure and add scans and transcripts of as many of the letters identified in phase two as it is possible to obtain. Phases two and three will require the widespread cooperation of libraries and scholars of the Romantic period.
Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters will digitally present the surviving correspondence of Romantic poet, writer, and editor Leigh Hunt (1784-1859).
With interest rising in Hunt and his many correspondents, the autograph letters are priceless source material for scholars of literature, history, opera, the visual arts, theatre, journalism, and politics. The primary goals of Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters are to make Hunt’s correspondence durable and easily accessible to a broad audience through digitization.
The project has several phases. The first brings together digital images of the 1,600 letters in the Brewer-Hunt Collection at The University of Iowa Libraries with previous cataloging. Unpublished transcripts made by David Cheney, held by The University of Toledo Libraries, are added to the digital letters to make them keyword searchable, more legible, and provide additional context. We are also gradually adding transcripts written by other scholars as we receive permission to include them.
The second phase will add information collected by Dr. Cheney about letters in other repositories and published in other, incomplete, editions of Hunt’s letters. We have already made initial contact with some other institutions with Hunt holdings and expect to soon begin adding images from a few of them. Once the first phase of the project is completed, we will begin to make plans for phase three, in which we hope to secure and add scans and transcripts of as many of the letters identified in phase two as it is possible to obtain. Phases two and three will require the widespread cooperation of libraries and scholars of the Romantic period.
With the initial eighteen month grant from the Delmas Foundation, the first phase of the project will be completed, making the nearly 1,600 letters in the Brewer-Leigh Hunt collection digitally and comprehensively accessible by uniting transcripts, description, and metadata. Completing this phase will allow us to move on, if additional funding can be found, to the second and third phases of the project, which will focus on the incorporation of Hunt letters from other repositories.
Unlike any previously published collection of Hunt’s letters, Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters does not merely reproduce the content of the letters, but instead provides facsimile images of the autograph letters. In this way, we open access to the rare and often fragile objects kept in Special Collections in a documentary way, while also endowing scholarly experience and criticism by allowing the intense examination of “bibliographic codes” (Jerome McGann), or physical traits that become part of the literary work. Often overlooked features, such as the spatial layout of the page, the color and size of the paper, the type of ink, and even the legibility of handwriting are all insightful components of the correspondence that are lost if one does not have access to the original physical artifact.
In addition to examining the letter as a physical object, images of the letters also allow each individual user to scrutinize the original content of the letter. Although transcripts are included to aid in legibility and keyword searching capability, an image of the original letter is present for comparison and personal interpretation.
Meticulously transcribing letters requires a large commitment of time, as well as a comprehensive knowledge of authors (and their handwriting styles). The University of Toledo Libraries has in its possession an ideal transcription aid in the papers of David Cheney, an Iowa PhD, who devoted much of his life to locating and transcribing all the Hunt letters known to be in existence. He intended to publish an edited edition of Hunt’s complete correspondence. Unfortunately, Cheney passed away in 2006 before his work could be realized.
The University of Toledo has loaned Cheney’s typed transcripts to Iowa for scanning and OCR purposes. Cheney’s transcripts reflect spelling, capitalization, and punctuation anomalies present in the original letters. Additionally, Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters recognizes and productively disseminates Cheney’s unpublished scholarly work. The University of Iowa Libraries has received permission from Cheney’s wife, Patricia Cheney, to make his work available. Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters fills a gap in Hunt scholarship by integrating Cheney’s editorial work with unedited access to the original autograph letters. We have also been fortunate to gain permission from Eleanor M. Gates and Anne Skagen to make use of Gates' transcripts from Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters. Brent Kinser of the Carlyle Letters Online has also graciously allowed us to use some of his transcripts for letters to and from the Carlyles.
The last component of the Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters involves metadata. With the library’s digital object manager software, CONTENTdm, metadata fields can be designated for keyword searching, thereby offering different access points to the letters. Descriptive metadata (e.g., author, date, summary of contents) is culled from the original catalog cards to appear alongside the digital facsimile. The metadata component of the digital record presents all of the information on the physical cards in a searchable way.
Each letter’s metadata record also cites where the letter has been published, allowing valuable resources such as Eleanor M. Gates’ recent work (1998) on Hunt letters to be noted, in addition to less obvious resources. To make the interface easy to navigate, the transcript is included in a metadata field and thus will be immediately apparent. Administrative and technical metadata (e.g., resolution, rights management) are present with each piece of correspondence as well in order to ensure visibility of the contributing institutions and their contact information for further access and image use rights.
A test bed of letters was chosen to represent the scope of the collection and perceived digitizing factors, including issues of date, addressee, physical size, legibility, content, and scanning resolution. These were digitized to evaluate how CONTENTdm would display the collection and to bring to light any unperceived technical problems.
The University of Iowa Libraries Digital Library Services has decided to integrate all current and future projects for maximum interoperability by using CONTENTdm software, and Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters uses this program as its structural basis.
CONTENTdm offers a high level of interoperability since it maps to Dublin Core metadata standards, as well as the capability of tailoring the structure to meet individual project needs. The project’s compliance with Dublin Core metadata standards and best practices ensures that it will be able to migrate easily and successfully for future software changes or upgrades.
For Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters, digital images of the nearly 1,600 letters are obtained either with a scanner or with a digital camera. Each letter averages three pages, totaling 4800 pages to be digitized, not including transcripts. About half of the letters have been scanned, using a Ricoh Aficio 2335 scanner, at 600 ppi and saved as tiff images for archival purposes. The file size of a letter scanned at 600 ppi ranges from 20-80 MB, depending on paper size and handwriting density.
However, the remaining letters were laid into larger sheets of paper and made into books, bound at Brewer’s discretion in fairly elaborate, often full leather, bindings. The Libraries’ conservation department has found that scanning the letters in the bound volumes would damage bindings that have intrinsic value and whose presence is integral to the provenance of the collection. Consequently, the bound letters are being scanned on a Zeutschel OS 12000 overhead scanner to attain the best archival results with the least damage. These scans will have the same high resolution as the others and likewise be saved as archival images.
The tiff images are being converted to jpeg images for online access in CONTENTdm. For multi-page letters, CONTENTdm constructs compound objects to keep pages of a letter linked together. The program automatically generates thumbnails for the images, which will appear with the title on searching and browsing screens. Metadata, including the transcript and rights information, is being inserted after the compound object has been made. Current policy for Iowa digital projects places a proprietary band on the image to indicate its institutional affiliation.
Further conditions for use are specified in the metadata field “Rights Management,” with the supplementary “Contact Information” field directly below it. The letters are all in the public domain, so concerns about copyright do not exist, except in the case of scholarly transcripts, which in we first gain permission to use before including in the database. The descriptive metadata culled from the card catalog records fills in many of the descriptive fields. Several of these fields use Library of Congress subject headings and controlled vocabulary for names.
The typed transcripts from Toledo have been scanned using the Ricoh scanner at 300 ppi, and then processed by OCR software, ABBYY FineReader 8.0. The OCR files are being carefully edited against the original transcript, since the purpose of using Cheney’s transcripts is to preserve his carefully executed scholarly work. After editing, the transcript as a whole is inserted into the record in a metadata field “Transcript,” with appropriate HTML tags to indicate page breaks. This text is fully searchable.
Additionally, each individual page record has its particular section of the transcript duplicated and located in the metadata field directly below the image. In this way, the reader can quickly see which text appears on that particular page, but the entire transcript is also available for reference on each page of the letter. References to Cheney and Toledo are made in “Transcript by” and “Transcript location” fields.
If transcripts from Cheney or other scholars are not available, other transcripts (e.g., those done by Luther Brewer) are used when available. If no transcript previously exists, a new one is created and checked for accuracy. In either case, the image of the original letter is available for personal interpretation of the letter’s content.
Finally, RDF (Resource Description Framework) tags is periodically extracted from the metadata to integrate Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters with the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) project. The NINES project has guidelines and standards for creating and transforming metadata into their required RDF format. RDF tags are part of the push toward the Semantic Web experience, which allows data to be shared and reused across applications.
The long-term home for this project is on the Libraries’ servers. Projects currently being developed with the Digital Library Services department must meet their requirements for using CONTENTdm software. This ensures interoperability and permits any future migration to upgraded or other software. The library is committed to showcasing and digitizing its unique collections to contribute to the information community. Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters does just that.
As a digital project, Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters is naturally disseminated over the Internet. The project is indexed through open-access initiatives and harvested by search engines like Google, which allows the actual content of the letters to attract users. The project is also included in the NINES project, which collates resources such as the Walt Whitman Archive and the Blake Archive. This will generate new and different contextual intersections with digital materials originating from the same time period and also ensure that scholars looking for resources on Romantic and Victorian literary figures will not overlook Leigh Hunt Online: The Letters since these letters often cast light on people other than Hunt himself.