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New - Parker on the Web update

Within its vaults, the Parker Library holds more than 550 manuscripts, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English, and the sixth-century St Augustine Gospels — used at the enthronement of the Archbishops at Canterbury.

The Master of Corpus, Christopher Kelly, has said, “Simply put, the Parker Library is one of the most important international cultural heritage assets in Cambridge. This College glories in one of the best collections in the world of medieval manuscripts and early printed books.”

Since 2009, digital reproductions of this magnificent collection of medieval and renaissance manuscripts have been available online for students and scholars. The launch of Parker on the Web in early 2018 opened the collection to members of the public. Since that time, nearly 60,000 users have accessed the collection, viewing 288,000 individual pages. Now it will be even more accessible thanks to an extensive overhaul of the manuscript descriptions and recent upgrades of its digital platform.

Parker on the Web is built with Mirador, an open-source web-based image viewer created  by a development team at Stanford University Libraries in Palo Alto, California and Harvard University in Boston. Mirador supports deep zoom, analysis, comparison and annotation of high-quality images. It is compatible with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) which provides a standardised method of describing and delivering images, and their metadata. Platforms that use the IIIF framework give users the ability to annotate and compare books, manuscripts and artworks from a worldwide community of libraries, museums and heritage organisations.

Because of this underlying IIIF infrastructure, Parker on the Web is not the only access point for users. An emerging primary portal for access to manuscripts in general is the Biblissima site, which is becoming a primary site for cross-collection search and discovery in the medieval manuscript space. And projects like the Durham Priory Library Recreated, eScripta, DigiPal, FromThePage, Stanford Global Currents, and others are pulling Parker data into external sites via IIIF for use and re-presentation.

Brighter, bigger and easier to share

Stanford University Libraries has partnered with Corpus Christi since the inception of Parker on the Web, contributing technical expertise from its digital library team. The team launched Mirador version 3 in November 2020 with a redesigned interface and API, and Parker on the Web 2.1 will reflect these changes.

For the current update, Olivia Staciwa, who is studying for her MLIS at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada has been working at Stanford to help prepare the update. Her work involves reviewing the fields to ensure they were properly migrated from the previous version of Mirador, writing guidance to working with Parker on the Web and beta testing new and changed options to ensure that on launch day Parker on the Web runs as smoothly as possible.

Olivia explains, “With the new update, features have been more streamlined which creates an easier experience when navigating through a manuscript. One feature that I think is quite exciting is that you will be able to scroll through the manuscript and have a thumbnail strip open at the bottom or to the right in the viewer. This can give you a better sense of what text or images may be coming up, or if you want to quickly look back at the last page you were on. It's as if you have a medieval manuscript in front of you with the added perk of being able to zoom in as if examining the text with a microscope.”

Other updates that will help users are the ‘share’ and ‘download’ functions. Researchers will have the option to save high-quality image (a page) of the manuscript to their computer or to share the manuscript with a simple link or by embedding it onto their own website. Whole text and image descriptions are searchable. And users can choose a light or dark theme for the viewer, and adjust the brightness and colour saturation of images, which will help to view manuscripts that have very faint text or images.

Videos showing the new features are available on the Parker on the Web site.

Virtual visitors welcome

The Donnelley Fellow Librarian, Dr Philippa Hoskin, hopes to take advantage of other features on the Mirador platform, such as easily-built digital exhibitions, to make the collection even more available to the public. 

She says, “During non-COVID times we do host visits and Open Days at the Library, but that only allows us to reach a certain number of people. We are looking at different ways to share the wealth of material we hold, including videos, webinars and curated exhibitions. Parker images are being shared regularly (and increasingly) on Twitter and other social media, which is increasing awareness of the site and the collection.”

Christopher Kelly says, “Corpus is committed to ensuring that its collection is shared and enjoyed by a wide audience through Parker on the Web, the digitisation of its manuscripts, talks and lectures, and frequent loans to museums around the world.”