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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal

8.4.1 Overview

The Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ) is a joint project between the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. It aims to digitise a critical mass (defined as at least 20 consecutive years) of three eighteenth century journals (Gentleman's Magazine, The Annual Register, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) and three nineteenth century journals (Notes and Queries, The Builder, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine). While not extremely rare, there are only perhaps 20-25 sets of each journal extant. The digitising will therefore need to be done on a non-destructive basis. ILEJ was selected as an example of a digitisation project working with non-scientific and older serial material. The ILEJ homepage is available online at <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/> .

The project aims to explore the issues associated with making this sort of material available as well as providing access to it. The variables they are particularly interested in are image creation, indexing techniques and Web access to page images. A number of their working decisions have been made with an eye to reducing the cost of doing this sort of work as far as possible. The intention behind providing access to the material in digital form is to facilitate access by researchers (through desktop access and search mechanisms) and to reduce the need for physical handling of the originals. The project aims to mount 120,000 page images in all.

The main informant for ILEJ was Peter Leggate, Keeper of Science Books, Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford University. Discussions also took place with a number of the technical staff at the Bodleian Library.

Last modified: Monday, 11-Dec-2017 14:39:28 AEDT