Digitising Red Books: the rigours and rewards of increasing online access to Victoria County History volumes (Part 2)

In this second of two blog posts, Anne-Marie Harvatt, VCH Digitisation Summer Intern 2024, reflects on the challenges and potentials of digitising historical sources.

As discussed in the earlier of these posts, digitising a VCH Big Red Book is far from straightforward and in many ways the experience is a microcosm for the digitisation of historical sources more widely. Many of the issues with which the team has been grappling will apply to any effort to digitise materials which were not ‘born digital’ and, in the case of these particular VCH volumes, those that were created in a pre-digital age. This post will consider a few of the many challenges associated with digitisation before focusing on the reasons why such work is both essential and rewarding.

As discussed in my previous post, simply managing the project has required the IHR to design new processes. This, alongside tracking and managing expenditure which does not follow a neat annual trajectory, has been a significant challenge. There are also ethical issues to be considered around the use of AI or outsourcing for parts of the project such as transcription and mark-up. There is no easy alternative to out-sourcing—the cost and labour-intensive nature of such work will always be a factor, as will time constraints and the fact that humanities organisations might lack the facilities or expertise to do this work in-house. Cost is, in fact, an all-pervasive issue, impacting the process at every stage. A case in point is that the end product of the project (additional VCH volumes available on British History Online/BHO) will not be in the ‘dream’ format of a high-quality page image alongside the marked-up transcription; as with almost all digitisation projects a balance is required between optimal and realisable.

A recurrent theme in conversations I had around digitisation during the course of the internship was sustainability, involving questions around how we avoid what Adam Crymble terms ‘technological obsolescence’ and the long-term maintenance of digital resources (often created using time-limited funding). The security of digital products remains a concern, as does finding ways in which a digital platform can generate a self-supporting income-stream, thus helping to pay for the support over time required to maintain it. The IHR is not naïve to these challenges and actively considers not only how to keep its digital products accessible and supported, but also its future direction in terms of steps the organisation might take to promote and support sources for and of digital history.

The challenges and complexities of digitisation accepted, it offers a range of possibilities, changing both how and by whom history is studied. Researchers with restricted access to libraries for a range of reasons (disabilities, poverty, work/caring responsibilities) are able to access material which might otherwise be difficult or impossible for them to use. The provision of Red Books online is part of a decades-long effort by organisations such as the IHR to increase global access to printed material (Project Gutenberg represents an early example of this). Alongside this, efforts are being made to increase access to the primary sources behind this printed material (and increasingly to provide more widely useable translations and transcriptions of those sources). Large-scale collections of parish registers and wills (Family Search), records of court cases, and historic maps (Layers of London) are all now available digitally.

Whilst each of these projects faced the challenges of digitisation, the drive to provide access to and increase engagement with such sources can be enormously successful. A Zooniverse-based crowd-sourcing project to transcribe and digitally catalogue hand-written index-card-based property records of medieval London (Get to Know Medieval Londoners), saw 2,356 individual volunteers engage in transcription, and the deliberate invitation from Layers of London to contribute to a new social history recorded c.15,000 entries of personal place-based stories and memories from members of the public. Such projects both facilitate historical research and widen history’s appeal as a discipline, enabling anyone with a computer and internet connection to contribute to and participate in the study of the past.

Some of the ethical issues around digitisation are touched on above, but the process also offers an opportunity to correct past errors or omissions. Dr Adam Chapman and Dr Ruth Slatter conclude that compilation of the early VCH volumes would not have been possible without the work of independent contributors, many of whom are not acknowledged in the printed volumes, and it is often difficult to find author details for those VCH volumes which are currently available on BHO. The Institute of Classical Study’s Beyond Notability project is working to ‘recover…and reveal the extent of women’s contributions’ to archaeology, history, and heritage, an acknowledgement that the involvement of women has often been under-credited and under-valued (their March 2022 blog post discusses a letter written by VCH researcher Margerie Venables Taylor, requesting that her skills be better reflected in her payment). This new phase of VCH digitisation offers an opportunity to ensure the contribution of all researchers and authors is clearly and correctly recognised, placing a focus on transparency and fair attribution (even where this is complex as a result of community-based authorship for newer volumes).

The deliberate and considered work of digital curation involved in this project is vital to encouraging interest and participation in history as a discipline. Humanities subjects, including history, are constantly required to defend their usefulness and purpose; demonstrating the wide reach of history and enabling increased participation in it can only be helpful in pushing back against an attacking narrative. It does not only serve this purpose, however, but enhances the study of history itself. We are now, perhaps more than ever before, interested in unearthing the lived experiences of past-peoples, in attempting to understand how historical events were impacted and experienced by those beyond the elite – having as wide a range of perspectives as possible on those past lives is not only helpful but essential.

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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