About the Project

Aldus@SFU represents the digital remediation of the Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection at Simon Fraser University Library in Vancouver—on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-waututh, and Squamish peoples.

SFU’s Wosk–McDonald Aldine Collection comprises 120+ books published by the famed Venetian press of Aldus Manutius between the 1490s and the 1580s. These books are exemplars in the history of publishing and the history of the book more broadly because they are key models and the prototypes for the book as we have come to know it today. These books span the end of the ‘incunabula’ period (1450–1500) in which the printed book is still escaping its manuscript heritage, to the beginning of the modern era in which the form of the book, its layout, typography, navigational features, and so on become recognizable to us today as what a book should look like. This is the dawn of the modern print era.

The Aldine Press is a particularly interesting moment in the history of both publishing and the book. There were, of course, other publishers in Europe and indeed in Venice in this period, but Aldus’ enterprise has long been recognized as the premiere press of the time, in part because of the scale and scope of his business (hundreds of editions, thousands of copies, and an international market), in part because of the innovations (in the form of the book, in typography and layout), and in part because of his scholarly work in establishing and promoting what we now recognize as the classical canon – the foundation of humanities scholarship.

Our core project team is Alessandra Bordini (AleB) and John Maxwell (JMax), from Publishing Studies program at SFU. Contact John at jmax@sfu.ca or on Mastodon

Credits and Acknowledgements

Alessandra Bordini is a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar and a doctoral student in Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her research encompasses publishing studies, the history of books and media, and the digital humanities. She is particularly interested in data curation for digital special collections, digital design, and the culture of book production and circulation in Early Modern Europe, with a focus on the early history of Renaissance Venice’s Aldine press. Alessandra holds a Master of Publishing from SFU and a Master of Arts in Translation Studies from the University of Siena (Italy).

John W Maxwell is Associate Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where his research has focused on the past and future of publication technologies, the history of computing, and the evolution of scholarly communication. His teaching runs the gamut from practical digital publishing tools and techniques to cultural criticism of the publishing industries, and most recently to the early histories of print technology.

We’ve been at work on this project in one way or another since 2015, when our colleague John Willinsky suggested that we ought to celebrate the quincentennary of Aldus’ death by putting the Wosk-McDonald Collection in the public eye.

Graduate Research Assistants JT Thomas and Minghui Zhou, both from the UBC iSchool did major work with Alessandra on the descriptive metadata for the books in the collection; JT also implemented our IIIF book-browsing interface, using the Universal Viewer tool. James Maxwell contributed photography, file wrangling, and library research.

The Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection came to to SFU in the 1995 when Morris and Dr Yosef Wosk, the latter a Vancouver-based scholar, public intellectual, and philanthropist helped fund the acquisition of Hugh and Jerry McDonald’s substantial collection of Aldine editions for SFU Library, with the enthusiastic support of Special Collections Librarian at the time Ralph Stanton and then-University President John Stubbs.

Since that time, SFU Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books (SCRB) division under the direction of Erick Swanick (2002–2015), Melanie Hardbattle (2015–2016), and (currently) Melissa Salrin have stewarded the collection, arranging access and exhibitions, and overseeing the digitization of the collection, a process begun in 2015. In recent years, Melissa Salrin has continued to add to the Aldine Collection, with support from Ralph Stanton and Sabine Mabardi as well as the McDonald family.

The SCRB Librarians – Melissa Salrin, Alexandra Wieland, Ewa Delanowski, David Kloepfer, Andréa Tarnawski, Tony Power, and Bran Eveland Cron have been enormously important in this project, helping wrangle the books and their metadata – so too have cataloguer Janette McConville, and Research Data Librarian Keshav Mukundu. Associate Dean of Libraries for Digital Strategy Mark Jordan has been a close associate and advisor of the project from the very beginning.

Ian Song, SFU’s Digitization Librarian, and his team of research assistants conducted the scanning and initial file management of the thousands of pages of the Collection: Brett Swanson, Dylan Bing-Manners, Kierra Enns, Kimberly Poleshuk, Bahar Vaghari Moghaddam, Saki Tasaka, Emma Sove, Shania Cheung, Natasha Tar, Sophie Vira, Paige Paulson, Natalie Cao, and Isobel Sinclair. Digital & Web Services Librarian Janice Banser has been an enormous help in integrating the library’s digitization into this project. We would also like to acknowledge Library Director of Advancement Ann McDonnell and Copyright Officer Donald Taylor for their help.

Aldus@SFU has drawn on the excellent support of SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) and especially Digital Scholarship Librarian Rebecca Dowson, Developer Joey Takeda, and Developer Michael Joyce. We first met Dr Kim O’Donnell when she was part of DHIL; later as FCAT Research Facilitator she helped us secure SSHRC funding for the project.

A number of graduate students at SFU have made significant contributions to the project over the years, including Dr Amanda Lastoria, Hailey Peterson, Reese Irwin, Brenda Luies, and Sophie Ashton.

Dr Emily O’Brien from SFU’s History department has made giant contributions to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance. And we of course thank Dr Raymond G Siemens for his bottomless enthusiasm, support, and intellectual leadership; we are all children of the DHSI and the INKE Partnership.

Aldus@SFU thanks the Government of Canada in the form of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for support of this project, via an Insight Development Grant.

Colophon

Aldus@SFU is built from Markdown and YAML using the Eleventy static-site generator. We use the 11ty plugins markdown-it, markdown-it-footnotes, markdown-it-anchor, and mdfigcaption.

The high-resolution page facsimile images from the Wosk–McDonald Aldine Collection are served via IIIF API from SFU Library’s Islandora repository. The IIIF viewer application is Universal Viewer.

Typography is ETbb (serif & italic), EncodeSans (sanserif), and Alegreya (Greek).