Digitising Red Books: the rigours and rewards of increasing online access to Victoria County History volumes (Part 1)

In this blog post, Anne-Marie Harvatt, VCH Digitisation Summer Intern 2024, reflects on the process of digitising VCH volumes for British History Online.  

My time as an intern at the IHR, working on one small part of the process of preparing Victoria County History volumes (non-born-digital historical sources) to be accessible online, has been illuminating. The current five-year Marc Fitch and IHR-funded project to increase the number of VCH volumes available on British History Online (BHO) will enable more people to access these invaluable resources, but the process is by no means straightforward. It represents part of the IHR’s ongoing efforts to continue the VCH project both through making existing material more widely available and the publication of new works including Red Books and Partnership Publications. This, the first of two blog posts reflecting on the digitisation of historical sources, will focus on the specific process of digitising older VCH volumes which are not currently available on BHO. A second post will discuss some of the wider challenges associated with digitisation (challenges to which the IHR team have had to find solutions), concluding with a reminder of the value of projects such as this to both end-user and digitising organisation.

Looking at the distinctively red-bound VCH volumes conjures images of those researchers who collated, wrote, and edited these works, the days, weeks, and months spent poring over manuscripts in dusty archives. Whilst the process of preparing the Red Books for online provision might differ from this romantic picture it too is painstaking, laborious, and time-consuming.

Unlike a digital offering such as Archive.org which opts for quantity over quality (the provision of as many texts as possible, if not in the most user-friendly format) BHO aspires to make its digitisation as effective as possible. Project lead, Dr Ruth Slatter, is clear that its intention is not to produce exact online replicas of the VCH volumes, but rather to ensure that their contents are made available in as widely useable a manner as possible. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy some degree of human-error remains unavoidable, and whilst there are many ways in which the material might be presented a priority of the project has been on producing user-friendly, sustainable digital offerings rather than rigid replicas; the appearance of the volumes on BHO will be ‘intentionally different’.

This requires meticulous preparation of the contents of each VCH volume, for which a bespoke process has been designed by the IHR:

Each stage detailed in the image above brings with it challenges around the combination of technology and historical sources. To name just one: the paper on which VCH plate images are sometimes printed does not always photograph well. Each step also requires meticulous attention to detail and is unavoidably time-consuming. For example, each volume needs to be character-counted before being transcribed and sectioned into appropriate parts so that it appears on BHO as intended. Even processes which the VCH has decided to outsource (like photographing volumes and getting them transcribed and marked up) have required the VCH team to develop detailed guidance documents. For example, transcription and mark-up instructions provided to third-parties include BHO’s general mark-up conventions, VCH-specific guidelines, and samples of marked-up text in the required format. How to deal with long ‘s’, fractions, ligatures, emphases, and footnotes (to name but a few) all need to be determined and communicated in order to ensure the volume appears as intended on BHO. And then there are post-production tasks which also require thought and precision. The images, captions, and author details which will sit alongside the text need to be prepared, an exercise which involves careful checking of image copyright to determine which images will be able to go onto BHO, and a rigorous approach to author attribution and contributor credit. My role within the project as intern has been one of these meticulous and time-consuming tasks: preparing the photographed versions of nine VCH volumes for transcription and mark up.

To ensure that content can be smoothly uploaded onto BHO, the VCH team send the photographs of volumes (for which no digital version exists) to be transcribed and marked up as sectioned PDFs, i.e. PDF files that contain all of the photographs of the pages from one section, such as the contents, list of images, or a chapter on a particular place. The nature of VCH volumes is such that no one-size-fits-all approach can be taken to sectioning their content: some include corrigenda, others contain lengthy lists of sources used; some have multiple indices, others only one; and the front matter and presentation of maps and images in each varies widely. As a result, volume by volume decisions have had to be made about what a ‘section’ should include. A case in point is Volume IV of the Staffordshire history (1958) which contains information on the Staffordshire Domesday, not a feature of the other volume IVs. The VCH team has had to decide how to section this content: should they divide the volume so that the survey, related discussion, and maps appear as separate sections, or include them as one part? Preparation of each unique volume requires consideration of similar issues, a series of decisions which are complex, time-intensive, and inevitably subjective in nature.

This problem only became clear after the VCH team sent nine pre-2005 Big Red Books to be photographed in early 2024. When they sent these volumes to be photographed they provided blanket sectioning instructions, which proved insufficient to ensure that the photographs were accurately arranged into appropriately sectioned PDFs. To resolve this problem, I have had to check each PDF and ensure it contains the appropriate content.  For each volume, I have had to separate out the photographs of the front and back matter (into covers, contents, editorial notes, indices, etc). I also had to frequently add missing, re-arrange incorrectly ordered, or remove pages which needed to be included in a different chapter.  Sometimes there were also missing images or misplaced maps or even entire chapter PDFs that were absent and needed to be added or compiled. Laborious and time-consuming though this checking work has been, the internship has been a wonderful opportunity to understand the complexities involved in digitising these sources and to learn about the many different steps involved. It has allowed me to gain experience working on a historical digitisation project, in a welcoming, supportive environment. The contents of the books have themselves been fascinating to dip into, a reminder that whilst the depth of detail makes them valuable resources for research they are also interesting to a wider audience. In addition, I am grateful to those who provided the opportunity to discuss digitisation and the potential future directions and priorities of both the IHR and BHO in terms of their digital presence.  

While it will always be necessary for the VCH team to check how the photographed content of VCH volumes have been sectioned in the future, it is hoped that this process will become less laborious now that they have developed better instructions for those photographing the volumes to help ensure that they correctly group the photographs into appropriate sections.

Anne-Marie Harvatt is in the final year of a masters in Medieval Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her current research is a social network analysis of York wills (1520-1540) and she is looking forward to starting a PhD which will extend this work and develop a new, automated methodology for inferring connections absent from the historical record.

Twitter/X: @amharvatt

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