Spring ’25 Update

We’re back in gear with the Aldus@SFU project, after some months of teaching and other distractions. Here’s what we’re working on this spring:

Conversion of our big ugly master metadata spreadsheet (~126 rows x 50 columns that Alessandra and I have been working on for many months) into nice clean YAML metadata that will shortly populate this website with comprehensive metadata about all the books in the collection. JT is busy wrangling CSV and YAML in Python, and we’ll be exposing some of that process here soon.

Tracking down Aldine author and contributor identities via LCNAF and VIAF: not a full linked-data connection as yet, but Minghui is working on linking every person named in our metadata with the authority records, so we at least have an anchor for these.

More books in the Collection! Melissa Salrin at SFU Library Special Collections continues to acquire Aldines! So our comprehensive metadata project is also playing catch-up with new volumes. A nice problem to have.

Learning about IIIF manifests. The IIIF APIs are going to be a central part of how this project works: the books in the collection are already all scanned, and the page images will be viewable through a IIIF viewer (possibly Mirador) on this website. In addition to being able to browse individual volumes, we also want to use IIIF manifests to provide thematic ‘guided tours’ through the collection, to tell stories about what was going on at the Aldine press.