Published every two weeks, November 7th, 2001

Rare e-books or E-rare books?
Northwestern Acquires the Octavo Rare Books Set
on CD-ROM
by Jeffrey Garrett, Bibliographer, Western Languages and Literature

With the rapid expansion (and dropping price) of storage space on library servers, the mantra of managers of electronic real estate today is no longer "location, location, location," but instead "bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth." Electronic files that are moved back and forth by libraries tend to peak out at several MB, not because they are too big to store, but because throughput speeds, even for cable and ISDN users, can result in frustratingly slow downloads. Therefore, image databases that a library maintains or brokers access to, e.g. Early English Books Online or the Gerritsen Women's History Collection, prefer using highly compressed image formats, such as .jpg and .gif, to the more extravagant formats such as .pdf.


Page spread overview of Milton's Areopagitica

But what about providing high-quality images that can be looked at closely, say, at magnifications of 200, 400, even 800%? Magnifications of this order are necessary for many purposes, e.g. close inspection of the book artifact, important for text criticism, editorial history, and analytic bibliography—all important auxiliary sciences in humanities research. This leaves a niche open for an older storage and distribution technology, at least for now: the CD-ROM. Northwestern University Library has recently acquired a full set of Octavo Digital Editions, currently 27 rare works of literature, science, religion, spanning 500 years of manuscript and printing history, from the early 1400s—the Wycliffite Manuscript of the New Testament (click here for NUL holdings)—to William Morris's edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (NUL holdings), published by the Kelmscott Press in 1896. All of these works are rendered in full color, uncropped, with images of the complete binding, front- and backmatter, and all blank pages.


Low resolution (72 dpi) rendering of page 8 of Milton's Areopagitica

Why can't the Library just put these editions up on the web? Well, consider the consequences of attempting to download a .pdf file 150 MB in size! That's how large the "examination" file is of Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665 (NUL holdings). So at least for the present, library users will simply have to make the trip to the Library's circulation desk to check out these "editions" and take them home—or, if the circulating copy is already in use, proceed a few steps further to the Electronic Reference Center in the Reference Library, where a copy of each work is always on hand.


Small detail of same page as above, but displayed at 432 dpi.

The rewards for this trip are enormous. Not only can the book be read conveniently on the screen, just as if you were sitting in the Folger Library. You can also take a close-up look at any page detail, e.g. a type ornament or a piece of reset type. But the Octavo editions are also full-text searchable: searching Hooke's masterpiece for the word "flea," for example, will take you immediately to the facsimile page where fleas are described and illustrated-the search words are highlighted in green. Finally, each Octavo CD includes expert commentary on the text. The Octavo edition of John Milton's polemic Areopagitica (1644; NUL holdings), for example, is enhanced by a knowledgeable commentary from book historian Nicolas Barker.

Need any more information? You can go directly to the Octavo website by clicking here. If you have any further questions, please contact the Library's bibliographer for Western Languages and Literatures, Jeff Garrett.