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The British Library's Electronic Beowulf

The Electronic Beowulf project at the British Library provides a illustration of an organization using the Web primarily as an in-house delivery mechanism, to facilitate the study of a fragile ancient manuscript, and to allow wider public access to it, at least in electronic form. The Library is experimenting with Web technology to create an image-delivery system, which will provide a simple-to-use front-end for the display of images to students of this ancient manuscript. It is intended to install a PC with a high resolution monitor in the reading room of the British library. The user will be able to view pages from the manuscript, and by pointing with the mouse to a specific part of the display, call up an enlarged image centred on that portion of the page. Since the system will be used by members of the public, the user interface must be straightforward. A kiosk-mode browser will be employed to prevent wider access to other Web pages.

Beowulf is an ancient Anglo-Saxon heroic poem, the most important of the few complete poems written in Old English to have survived, and one of the finest cultural products of its age. The original Beowulf manuscript is several hundred years old, and in an extremely fragile physical condition, so allowing people to handle it routinely is out of the question. The poem is generally thought to date from some time in the eleventh century AD. The manuscript was written by two scribes, with recognizably distinct spelling and scripts. In the eighteenth century, it was quite badly scorched around the edges in a fire, which resulted in the loss both of whole passages and of many words and phrases. The use of the most modern of media to study an example of the most ancient seems almost poetically appropriate!

Very high resolution images of the manuscript have been produced, using a digital camera and a variety of light sources: bright visible light, fibre optic back-lighting and ultraviolet light. Image-processing software has been used to enhance the legibility of faded passages from the text. The end result is a collection of electronic images which reveal considerably more about the manuscript than can be detected with the naked eye, such as corrections to the script and fragments of words previously obscured when the manuscript was re-bound after the fire damage. Unfortunately, in order to achieve the high resolution images necessary for serious study, the image files are enormous. The data necessary to record a single page can take up about 200Mb, although the amount that can be displayed at any one time is a fraction of that: about 100kb. The images to be displayed by browsers are generated from the full data as requested.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.