EGIL - Electronic Gateway for Icelandic Literature

Purpose of the project

The project aims to enhance support for research in Icelandic, Old Norse and Viking studies by:

1.    Providing a mechanism which will enable individual collections to be developed within the context of the holdings of all partner libraries, so offering the opportunity for optimum coverage of the material available and most effective use of acquisitions budgets;

2.    Providing online access to information about all the printed material held by the partners;

3.    Establishing a subject gateway with information about relevant material held in research collections in the UK and world wide, and links to relevant web sites;

4.    Making certain rare texts available over the web.

Achievements so far

1.    Partners have agreed a methodology to facilitate the collaborative development of their collections. The technical aspects of this - a web form and archive - were put in place early in the project, and testing, refinement and evaluation of the methodology have been ongoing during the remainder of the project.

2.    Cataloguing/retroconversion has been carried out at partner sites which had Icelandic/Old Norse material which was not accessible via their online catalogue. The work has already been finished at two sites and is on schedule for completion by the end of the project at the other three.

A format for mapping partners’ holdings of Icelandic/Old Norse material (and of subcollections within these collections) was agreed and the resulting descriptions have been included within the subject gateway.

3.    The subject gateway has been created to hold information about significant resources for research in Icelandic and Old Norse studies in the UK and world-wide. The infrastructure connected with it has been developed to facilitate the highly collaborative nature of this part of the project. For not only are several partners involved in the creation of the gateway content, but the sites selected for inclusion and the evaluative descriptions of them are subject to validation by all partners and academic advisers to the project before they are published.

4.    The selection of texts to be digitised under the project was guided by the academic advisers to the project and all the texts are related to the themes of textual transmission, the reception of Icelandic culture, and the cultural links between Iceland and Britain. The scanning of the texts is now complete and the scanned version mounted on the project website. The diversity of the physical volumes meant that virtually each one raised particular technical issues relating either to the process of image capture and manipulation or to how the images should be mounted and the navigation options offered to the user.

End deliverables

• Methodology to maximise use of resources in the field and facilitate collection management of individual collections within the context of the national holdings and assessment of the viability of using such a methodology long term;

• Complete access to all the partners’ Icelandic holdings through their OPACs (searchable over the Web) and through COPAC and BLPC;

• High quality bibliographic records for the material, accessible via the CURL database;

• Web page and subject gateway which maps resources at UK research collections in the field and provides evaluation of and links to relevant pages world wide;

• Full text of selected titles available on the web (scanned as image).

Partners

University of Nottingham (lead site)

University College London

University of Leeds

University of Oxford, Bodleian Library

University of Oxford, English Faculty Library

British Library

Project Manager

Project website

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/library/egil/index.html

Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 2 July 2002