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Technical Information

Website development

Digitisation of the Sir John Malcolm Shikshapatri at the Bodleian Photographic Studio.

A technical partnership between the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and Oxford ArchDigital has resulted in a “manuscript study shell” which incorporates the manuscript images, video and audio clips, essays, transliterations, translations, glossaries and pictures.

The main body of the learning resource is delivered in Oxford ArchDigital's ToadHMS software. ToadHMS is a fully integrated content management system that allows the storage of text, images and geographical location data for the recording of landscapes, heritage data and archaeological sites. It is also extremely versatile, making it as useful for manuscript study as it is for archaeological study.

The majority of the text-based content of the site has been created in XML. The content was encoded by our technical partners at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at Kings College London.

Although this resource is intended for those outside the formal education sector the technical challenges are identical to those that would be presented by creating a more academic resource. The study environment is therefore being developed using open standards and open source software with an architecture that allows it to be re-purposed for academic use.

Digitisation of the manuscript started in Jan 2002 and was completed by May using the Bodleian Library’s in house studio. The manuscript was digitised at 600 dpi using a Betterlight Super 8K scanning back on a Horseman large format view camera and was supported on a Buchanan conservation copy stand. Each page generated a file of 79-81 megabytes and the scanning process took 3-5 minutes per page.