Aldus@SFU

The Wosk–McDonald Aldine Collection

Funding Good News, at Last!

JMax • September 20, 2024 • project

We’ve known unofficially since June, but Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has finally gotten around to making the results of the competition public. The good news is this: Aldus@SFU: Remediating Special Collections was awarded just under $70,000 from the Insight Development Grant program, to fund research assistants and a bit of travel over the next two years.

This project has been quietly brewing for a long time, running just on enthusiasm and side-of-the-desk labour, but getting a research grant now kicks the project into gear. Our priorities, as we proposed in the grant, are:

  1. Bibliographic description and contextualization of the books: compiling a rich set of descriptive metadata about SFU’s collection, and cross-referencing that to other online collections around the world;

  2. Presentation of the Collection online as an open-access, public-facing web resource: developing a multi-layered interpretive website (featuring cultural history, biography, typography & printing information) that surrounds a IIIF-based interface for browsing and examining the books themselves;

  3. Analysis of the evolution of publication form and style over time: curating and showcasing bibliographic evidence of evolution in layout, type, and navigational elements;

  4. Gathering of communities of interest: embracing the ideals of open scholarship to connect with different kinds of audiences – not just book historians, but also students and teachers, designers, collectors and other curious people!

The big question we posed in the grant application was how can we open up and activate these historically critical resources and develop both new audiences and new modes of engagement? Digitizing the books is a first step, but we want to explore how to draw out the relevance of the Collection and its stories for much broader audiences.

Our method is the iterative development of the prototype public-facing web resource: the blog you’re reading right now is the embyronic version of that. Already (as of summer 2024) there’s an early version of the book metadata featured here, a layer that should come to full fruition this winter. At some point this winter too the digitized collection will come online here via IIIF book viewers, allowing browsers to dig deep into the books themselves.

And from there, we add new layers: interpretive guides and historical context; navigational overlays on the collection that showcase different features and facets of the books and their history; and the scholarship that emerges from this project, both from our team and from others.

Many times we have said that SFU’s Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection is a treasure chest full of wonders: it represents the moment when modern print culture emerges; it reveals enormous iterative evolution of the form and style of the book; and it represents one of the first substantial projects in canon-formation, establishing the core of humanities scholarship not just within coterie groups, but spreading across wider audiences in Europe and beyond. These books are full of stories: not just their texts, but in how they present themselves and how they came to be in the world. We want to share these stories!