Summer of Metadata

It’s been a long time since we’ve written any updates here, but in fact a lot has been going on this summer! Our little team is four people this year: we have UBC iSchool MLIS students JT and Minghui working as RAs alongside Alessandra and me. And most of the work has been about metadata; as this phase of the project nears completion, let me take the opportunity to tell you about it.

Last fall we started in on a master inventory of the Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection: we built a big spreadsheet with all the books in the collection, and began by including SFU’s library catalogue information. And then we started building that out: lots of other sources of information exist – such as the collectors’ notes that accompanied many of the volumes when they were acquired by SFU Library; and a wealth of scholarly information about the books – but hadn’t been assembled in a single comprehensive source anywhere. We eventually realized that that our project was probably going to become that source. So, without intending to produce a catalogue for the collection, in effect that’s what we’ve been working on.

A number of facets of this information are particularly interesting: the first one is this: we measured all the books. With a ruler. No one had done this before – and I suppose traditional cataloguing wisdom is that the record points you to the physical object, and when you hold it in your hands you will then know how big it is. But as we’re describing not just a physical collection by also, importantly, a digital collection, stating the size of the books is critical. If we show you an octavo edition and a folio edition onscreen, you have no immediate way of knowing that the one is little and the other is big! So we took rulers, and captured the trim size (pages, not bindings), thickness, and also the dimensions of the main type block on the pages – all in millimetres. This job took far longer than I thought it would: it actually took about ten visits to the Collection for Alessandra, James, and I to get the measurements of all^[1] 120 books – partly because we’re nerds and it’s impossible for us to look at these books without going “Ooh” and “Ahh” and getting excited about all sorts of details. But we now have a set of measurements data – accurate within 2 or 3mm^[2] or so.

Another interesting process – again which turned out to be a bigger task than we’d anticipated – is gathering author information about these editions. For some of the volumes – e.g., Cicero’s Rhetoric – this isn’t complicated: the author is Marcus Tullius Cicero. But lots of the Aldine editions have much more complex authorship: Aldus often bound several writers together in a single edition (e.g., Catullus, Tibullus, Prope[r]tius). Also, there are sometimes named translators, editors, and other contributors. These people are all known in the scholarship around these books, but that level of detail certainly doesn’t exist in the Library Catalogue data, unless it happened to be part of the title page transcription. We wanted to ensure that our presentation of these books was comprehensive, so this information is important!

Dealing with historical (classical, medieval, Greek, Latin, and Italian…) authors is itself a tricky process. There are often loads of different versions of their names! This is especially true with Greek authors, whose names are rendered in Greek, and in Latin, and sometimes in more modern, familiar versions as well. Wrangling all that complexity is more than we can reasonably do here, so we are leaning heavily on Name Authority Files: we can just say “Cicero” and then provide links to online authorities. Now, as is the case with all so-called “standards,” the charming thing about Name Authority Files is that there are several of them! So we have gathered links to the Library of Congress Name Authority and the Virtual International Name Authority, as well as the Italian bibliographic databases Edit16 and the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale – all of which were needed before we had at least one authority reference link to each of the 350+ author/contributors in our collection! Alessandra and Minghui spent countless hours tracking all of these links down so they can be a quick click from any of our book pages.

One of our early ambitions with the Aldus@SFU project was to attempt to link together our digitized collection with other digitized Aldines at libraries around the world. So Minghui spent many many hours this summer sifting through databases like the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue and Universal Short Title Catalogue (as well as Googling!), gathering links to other institutions’ digitized copies matching the editions in our collection. The dream here is that if you’re looking at the digital facsimile of our copy of Aesop’s Fables you may want to compare that with another version elsewhere. In fact you absolutely should do this, because our Aesop is peculiar!^[3]

At this point (mid-August 2025) we do not have one master spreadsheet; we have multiple spreadsheets, because the gathered information is too big and multi-level to fit in a single spreadsheet. This is where JT comes in: JT has been working on a Python tool (and the workflow that goes along with it) to export and convert all that tabular data into nice, hierarchical data in YAML and JSON formats: YAML because our website runs on YAML metadata, so if we load it all in that way, we can design nice user interfaces for it (stay tuned in the coming months for lots of changes on this front); the JSON is going to be handy in developing a search feature for the site.^[4] My hope is that once we’re free of the spreadsheets (which are super handy tools for information gathering) we can manage all this metadata in some more robust formats. Spreadsheets weren’t really meant for this kind of data management! Stay tuned for a post about the details of the data consolidation process.

In all, it’s been a ton of detail work, assembling a single set of information from a wide variety of sources, in the service of describing and contextualizing our Aldines the best we can. We didn’t set out to compile a catalogue, but perhaps that’s where we will end up!