THE ELECTRONIC BEOWULF

The Electronic Beowulf is a project that aims to create a digitised
image archive for the text of Beowulf, accessible to users in a
variety of electronic formats.  In its first stage of a development
the project will produce a full-colour, on-line digitized facsimile of
Cotton MS.  Vitellius A.xv, available for public use at the British
Library, while an international team of scholars test and evaluate the
images for research and teaching.  The images available on this ftp
site are test images taken in the early stages of the project.  The
project will include not only images made directly from the manuscript
under normal light conditions, but also pictures of hidden or obscure
text taken with the aid of ultra-violet light and fibre-optic
backlighting.  Already, pictures have been taken of more than 150
sections of the manuscript obscured by mounts used in restoration of
the manuscript in the 19th century.  The use of a digital camera makes
the recording of readings using special light sources much easier than
conventional photography.

In subsequent development through the middle and late 1990s the
project expects not only to refine images and image capture techniques
but also to add to the archive digitised copies of early transcripts,
editions and collations.  Hyper-links will be developed between these
elements to provide scholars with a powerful tool for exploring the
whole range of material bearing on the transmission of the Beowulf
text.  Ultimately, the project will issue a range of publications such
as a full colour facsimile in electronic form, a research package
giving access to the full archive, and teaching versions for various
educational levels.

The project is one of the British Library's `Initiatives for Access'
undertaken in pursuit of its commitment to use imaging and network
technology to make its collections more widely available.

The editor of the project is Professor Kevin Kiernan, Department of
English, University of Kentucky (kiernan@beowulf.engl.uky.edu).  The
academic directors of the project are Professor Kiernan and Professor
Paul E.  Szarmach, State University of New York, Binghamton
(pszarmac@math.ias.edu).

The British Library team is John Bennett, Project Manager
(john.bennett@bl.uk), Andrew Prescott of the Manuscript Collections
(andrew.prescott@bl.uk), David French of the Manuscripts Collections
and Ann Gilbert of the Photographic Service.

For more details about British Library `Initiatives for Access',
contact the Information Officer, Jonathan Purday (jon.purday@bl.uk).

A fuller illustrated account of this project by Kevin Kiernan is
available via Mosaic at either of the following URL addresses:
http://convex.cc.uky.edu, UK!, Facts Center
http://www.uky.edu/ComputingCenter/Welcome.html (document title is "UK
FACTS Center").

For further details about the image files in this directory, see
`descrip.txt'