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Date Posted: 07:52:40 10/30/02 Wed
Author: Lark
Subject: Something for Beck and Wormie (and the rest of us, too, for that matter!)

No One can destory KENNY'S books, now!!

Historic Books

Software makes historic books real page turners

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 10/30/2002

We stopped into the Boston Athenaeum last week, sat down with the "Sherborne Missal," and began to leaf through the pages. You know that book, right? It's an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript, with 690 21-by-14-inch vellum pages of gorgeously painted biblical and medieval English scenes. Recently acquired by the British Library for $24 million, it's rather pleasant to look at it close-up, turning the pages by hand.

OK, not the actual book, but something almost as good, and equally astonishing in its own way. A delegation from the British Library was in town demonstrating a new computerized display system called Turning the Pages, which allows anyone to "virtually" turn the pages of, so far, eight priceless manuscripts. With the e-Book, the Bookman, and other would-be successors to real books already headed for the dustbin of history, leave it to the Brits to think up a futuristic system that goes back to where books have been for 1,700 years. "It's the closest most of us can get to turning the actual pages," says Michelle Brown, the British Library's curator of illuminated manuscripts.

One sees a digital image of the red-jacketed book on a computer screen, transformed with digital animation from a digital film of the original. Touch the cover with a fingertip and the book opens. Slide the fingertip right to left across a right-hand page, and it turns over. Let go too soon and the "page" flops back. The effect is eerily realistic. The dazzling gold paint reflects light from somewhere overhead. The page seems to be heavy, and as it moves, its shadow precedes it.

Touch any spot on any page, and a close-up enlargement appears, with a nearby "magnifying glass" that can be moved by fingertip around the page. Touch the audio icon, and a narrator tells you what you are looking at. On the pages with musical notation, touch an icon and a monastic choir breaks into Gregorian chant. The birds throughout are real English species; touch an icon, and they sing.

The system was developed so that priceless manuscripts, normally either locked away in climate-controlled vaults or displayed one page at a time under subdued light, could be available for anyone. The software is owned by the British Library, but its hope is that other libraries can use it to display their own treasures, at a per-page cost of $1,500 to $2,300.

Books on the system so far include the fifth-century Buddhist "Diamond Sutra," the world's oldest dated printed book; a collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings known as the "Arundel Codex;" the "Golden Haggadah," a 14th-century Hebrew service book from Spain; the "Sforza Hours," a 15th-century Italian prayer book; and "Blackwell's Herbal," a book about medicinal plants. Future books will include Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures Under Ground," "William Blake's Notebook," and Vesalius's drawings on anatomy.

The full set can be seen on the 37-inch screens at the British Library and, in the United States, at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md. A sample version is available on the British Library's Web site: British Library Books

Brown and Clive Izard, the library's creative projects manager, have the bubbly enthusiasm of people who have just invented the abacus or the pencil — they can't wait for people to try it out, as if they are disseminating the ancient treasures within. "The challenge is to get people from the present into the past," Brown says. "Books are the perfect portal."

On a PC without a touch screen, the mouse will replace the fingertip, though it's much less fun. Izard recalled a demonstration for Queen Elizabeth II. "She put her finger down to turn the pages," Izard says, "but it didn't work. I had to say to her, `Your Majesty, it's your gloves."' For some reason, the bare fingers have to make contact. But that too is realistic; she probably couldn't turn the real pages with gloves on, either. Did he tell her to take them off? He didn't, and she didn't.

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

:o)

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