Kulturarvsdigitalisering utgör inte sällan en komplicerad kedja av händelser, aktörer samt tekniska och kvalitetsmässiga alternativ. Samtidigt närmar sig både allmänhet och forskare digitala reproduktioner (s.k. digitalisat) med en ”face value”-attityd. Digitalisatet antas vara identiskt med det fysiska originalet, trots att det egentligen är en simulering, och trots att en serie av redigeringar ofta har företagits mellan den ursprungliga bildfångsten och det användaren ser framför sig på skärmen. Dessutom saknas ofta den historiska och bibliografiska länken mellan det användaren ser på skärmen och det fysiska föremål detta påstår sig avbilda. Sådana länkar uttrycker digital proveniens. Digitalisering antas föra samhällets kulturarv närmare användaren, men paradoxalt nog kan på det här sättet ytterligare avstånd införas mellan kulturarv och allmänhet. Vilka verktyg kan de digitaliserande institutionerna erbjuda för att användare ska kunna bedöma digitalisatens proveniens, autenticitet och tillförlitlighet? 

Scholarly users of digital reproductions (so-called facsimiles) in digitized collections tend to approach the reproductions on a face value basis, but how can they be certain that what they see on the screen is "the same" as the physical source document the reproduction purports to reproduce? Digitizing institutions may provide keys for the user to unlock this kind of digital provenance, where paradata and metadata will be important, together with e.g. extant project documentation, paratextual material, and access to the uncompressed master files from which the reproduction presented on screen derives.

Den vetenskapliga textutgivningens forskningsobjekt är definitionsmässigt ’text’’. Historiskt har produkten av detta textkritiska arbete framför allt antagit formen av en enskild etablerad, sekventiell transkriptionstext. Dagens digitala utgåvor letar efter andra former, vyer och nivåer. Mest omedelbart sker detta genom s.k. digitala faksimiler som åtföljer hela transkriptionstexten. Faksimilerna ska verifiera grunden för den etablerade transkriptionstexten genom att erbjuda fotografier av textvittnen som ett slags objektiva rådata, gentemot vilka användaren t.ex. kritiskt kan pröva utgivarens textetablering. Men hur vet användaren vad det är för avbildad källa han eller hon ser framför sig på skärmen, finns t.ex. uppgifter om reproduktionens proveniens? Man kan också ifrågasätta faksimilbildernas objektivitet. Behöver vi ”se” dem med en mer (text)kritisk blick? Finns det rentav anledning att betrakta dem som delar av utgivarens forskningsobjekt på nivå med ’text’?

The concepts of original and copy, of source and facsimile, always convey particular understandings of the process of reproducing documents. This essay is an analysis of these concepts, in particular copies and facsimiles, framed within the context of digital reproduction. The activities and cases discussed are picked from two areas: digital scholarly editing and cultural heritage digitization performed by research libraries. The conceptual analysis draws on three fields of scholarly inquiry: scholarly editing, library and information science, and philosophical aesthetics.

Provenance research in digitized memory institution collections is mainly devoted to documenting and mapping the trajectories of the physical source documents across time, place and contexts, primarily by developing metadata standards and data models. The provenance of the digital reproduction and its relation to one or several physical source documents is however not being subjected to much inquiry. A possible explanation for this is the face-value approach with which we tend to regard digital reproductions. Looking more closely at such reproductions and their complex digitization process suggests a far from straightforward and linear provenance relation, and begs the question of what it is we actually see on the screen and what source document the digital reproduction purports to reproduce. To ascertain this provenance bond and hence the value, authenticity and usability of the digital reproduction, users need to be provided with keys such as a thorough account of the digitization process, access to various states of the digital images, exhaustive metadata for the reproduction, and not least paradata documenting the digitization process, including conversion, editing, curation, and decisions made during the process.

However you define digital humanities (DH), it often revolves around digitized objects at libraries and archives. In particular, such digital reproductions are used within digital scholarly editions. There, the digital facsimiles are not only illustrations supporting a scholarly text transcription, but can also serve as research tools and instruments for accountability and accessibility. Nevertheless, the “critical gaze” of scholarly editors and DH is directed at text transcriptions, whereas digital facsimiles are often uncritically taken at face value. There seems to be room for an increased critical understanding of such images as interpretations based on scholarly informed deliberation. Partly, this “face value” approach is fostered by the paradigm of mass digitization, where image capture is considered a trivial and straight-forward task. But many projects and materials need other approaches, and labels such as critical digitization (Dahlström 2010) or slow digitization (Prescott & Hughes 2018) suggest alternative strategies. In fact, whereas several library digitization projects seem to take on the form of scholarly editing, recent trends in digital scholarly editing such as documentary editing seem to overlap with library digitization. How do these activities relate to one another, and what can they learn from each other? In this talk, I will address some of the critical considerations libraries face when digitizing their holdings, with significant bearing on the value and (re)usability of the digital reproductions when placed within a scholarly context. Examples from digitized library collections will be used to support a discussion on authenticity, provenance, accessibility, openness, (re)usability, social engagement and collaborative efforts.

The aim of the paper is to share the experience of collaboration among Scandinavian iSchools in creating and implementing a joint course. The authors explore their own activity and documentation produced in relation to the collaboration around the development and implementation of the advanced course on ebooks. The results of the collaboration are expressed in terms of new experience, knowledge, and implementation of a new course on the advanced level for library and information science students. The results of the paper generalize these experiences and present the challenges and lessons learned in the process of collaboration. The paper presents a workable administrative model for cross-national joint courses. In addition, it outlines design and teaching methods for a Master’s course on e-books for library and information science students. A joint course with a shared syllabus and cross-national teacher teams gives added value to the students by getting the best out of the combined expertise. Administrative details should be implemented locally at the collaborating universities rather than try to standardise everything.

Litteraturbanken (The Swedish Literature Bank) is a freely available digital collection of Swedish literary works, ranging from medieval to contemporary literature. It is the result of a cooperation between literary and linguistic scholars, research libraries, and editorial societies and academies. The collection consists not only of digital facsimiles, but of ocr’ed, proof-checked and TEI-encoded transcriptions as well, including EPUB and HTML versions of texts, and in addition scholarly presentations and didactic introductions to works and authors in the collection. It is also being used as a publishing platform for ongoing Swedish scholarly editing projects. Litteraturbanken currently comprises more than 2.000 works, mounting up to more than 100 million of machine-readable words. Litteraturbanken‘s main weak spot is transparency; it does not openly provide satisfactory ways to ensure the editors accountability for the edited texts and images. As a whole, however, Litteraturbanken is an impressive endeavour and paves the way for fruitful cooperation and massive data exchange with e.g. computational linguistics and bibliographic databases.

So far, this conference has focused on research. Let us now devote our attention to issues of education and training in library and information science (LIS). Specifically, I will address issues of education in the field of digitization.1 During one of the keynote addresses yesterday, we were presented with examples of superbly crafted cultural heritage digitization projects, where the digitized collections and artifacts are lavishly presented and browsable in a creative visualization manner and based on, one would assume, the highest demands on technical standards. I, too, will be talking about digitizing cultural heritage artifacts, but in the form of student-run projects, at an undergraduate and master’s level, where the methods and the work process are the aim, rather than the finished digital product itself.

This article frames digitization as a knowledge organization practice in libraries and museums. The primarily discriminatory practices of museums are compared with the non-discriminatory practices of libraries when managing their respective cultural heritage collections. Digitization of cultural heritage brings new practices, tools and arenas that reconfigure and reinterpret not only the collections, but the memory institutions themselves as well as the roles they respectively play on a societal level. The development of digitization promises to bridge some gaps between libraries and museums, either by redefining their respective identity, or by forming new ground where the interests of the respective institutions naturally meet or even converge, or by neglecting particular tasks and roles that do not seem to find a natural home in the new territory. Two poles along a digitization strategy scale, mass digitization and critical digitization, are distinguished in the article. As memory institutions are redefined in their development of digitized document collections, e.g., by increasingly emphasizing a common

The Swedish School of Library and Information Science has been offering dedicated courses in cultural heritage digitization since 2004. This paper describes the implementation of new assignments, projects and events in the courses that were developed since 2008. These new events include a critical image editing workshop, a text encoding enhancement of “dirty” OCR texts, experimental and critical evaluation of OCR software performance, and the design of a realistic digitization plan. The course innovations strengthen the course’s pedagogical legacy of sustainability and Dewey’s pragmatism, particularly of having the students perform hands-on work in digitization, experimenting with technology and drawing critical conclusions from the analysis of the results. To avoid some of the risks of naïve pragmatism however, the pedagogy and course design draws ideas from Lave’s and Wenger’s notions of situated learning by having the students engage in both local material with a situated relevance and testing their ideas in in particular existing communities of practice and/or expertise.

In early 2007 there was an art exhibition in Stockholm by Swedish artist Kajsa Dahlberg,1entitled A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries.2The exhibition included a printed edition of a quite peculiar book the artist had composed. The book and the exhibition triggered some thoughts about book studies and the role of the reader, about bibliography and textual studies, and about marginalia and other kinds of reader interaction in books. But let us begin from the beginning — here is the background of the exhibition and the book.

In fourteen thoughtful essays this book reports and reflects on the many changes that a digital workflow brings to the world of original texts and textual scholarship, and the effect on scholarly communication practices. The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics and literary studies suggests that text scholarship is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative scientific data. However, developing this potential also highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts that are central to interpretation – individualism, subjectivity – are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data.

LIS education takes place in an increasingly networked, global world. Yet library services are maintained through local practices. How can Library and Information Science (LIS) educators address the mutual interaction between practices on a local and a global scale, in particular in programmes devoted to digital libraries, the distributive Internet, and new media? In the presentation, we draw on examples from a master’s programme in Digital services to illustrate how we have tried to integrate three levels of scale – macro, meso (interpreted as national), and micro – in the programme. In particular, we emphasize the importance of 1) integrating the global phenomena and theories commonly associated with digital environments with local practices, for instance through working with existing services, organizations and resources, and 2) finding educational models that help the students make connections between the global and the local.

The Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) has for some years been offering courses in cultural heritage (CH) digitization in cooperation with some major national digitizing agents. During that work, various problematic issues and challenges, to some degree perhaps familiar to several other digitization educators, have arisen. This article describes the aims and nature of the particular CH digitization education at SSLIS, accompanied with a brief overview of Nordic CH digitization education efforts. Ten particular challenges when launching and managing the course are highlighted. By identifying such challenges and discussing possible ways to tackle them, the authors hope to encourage discussions that can serve future education planning.

Libraries and other memory institutions have throughout history developed a range of methods and tools for transmitting full texts between material carriers and across media family borders. In this sense, library digitization belongs to the same tradition as 20th century microfilming and the ancient transcribing of manuscripts. The Gutenberg era marked a sharp decline in this full text transmitting business, and libraries devoted their time to producing bibliographical knowledge organization (KO) labels for documents rather than reproducing the full documents themselves. With digital reproduction technologies however, libraries have drawn a historic circle. They are yet again dedicating much energy and attention to the full text transmission they largely abandoned at the dawn of the printed age. In so doing, they take on a much more explicit role of producing and shaping the digital cultural heritage (CH) in addition to its accustomed role of preserving it and making it available. In this paper, we will discuss the practices of digitization within the library institutional setting, and in particular, the national library setting

Aktuell debatt och forskning kring bibliotekens intensiva digitaliseringsverksamhet handlar nästan uteslutande om massdigitalisering. Men detta är inte den enda strategin för digitalisering. Mängder av andra digitaliseringsprojekt pågår på världens bibliotek som inte kan kallas massdigitalisering – vad skall de då kallas? Bidraget föreslår att vi betecknar dem kritisk digitalisering – en verksamhet som bär nära släktskap både intellektuellt och historiskt med kritisk textutgivning. Är de två verksamheterna kanske rentav på väg att smälta samman, och vad innebär det för bibliotekens del?

This paper addresses concrete evidences of performed readings of literary works: marginalia. Although book history to some degree does deal with that topic, it is primarily the marginalia of prominent authors that is being researched (sometimes resulting in scholarly editions), while the scribbles and notes of ”common” readers form a rare topic (some examples are Jackson, Fadiman, Golick, and Gingerich). Readers' marginalia in library books is an even smaller field within book history (see Meiman). Taking my point of departure, and showing examples, from a Swedish art work from 2007 by Kajsa Dahlberg, I will discuss such marginalia in general and in library books in particular. The artist collected all the underlinings, highlightings, drawings, notes and other visible evidence of social use from more than 100 public library copies of one and the same edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from 1929. With the use of a lightboard, all these marginalia and ”social evidence” were copied and projected into one and the same base document, resulting in a quite literal form a ”reader's edition” of Woolf's work. The result was printed and published as a facsimile edition (of 1000 copies). In the printed book, the one edited text by Woolf is therefore foreshadowed by the many added texts of its readers, making the book something very different from a traditional scholarly edition of a literary work – an anti-edition, if you will. I suggest that this kind of work of art directs our attention to e.g. the roles between readers, editors and writers within primarily the world of scholarly editing. As an atypical piece of work, it also provides an opportunity to discuss the typical nature of facsimile editions and the “typical” book and edition.

Scholarly editing based on textual criticism means examining a bulk of documents and their texts, clustering these around the abstract notion of a work, arranging them in a web of relations and trying to represent this web in the scholarly edition, a surrogate purporting to represent the work. The way the edition positions the documents to the work, and itself as mediator between them, is affected by such factors as ideology, epistemology, aim and function, tradition, and supporting and distributing media. Scholarly editions are to some extent hermeneutical documents and subjective interpretations, in two senses: they carry with them a history of ideology and a hermeneutical heritage, and they also exert an interpretative influence over the objects they are designed to manage. Nevertheless editions have a strong tradition of conveying a sense of value-free objectivity, a mere recording of (matters of) fact. Charles Bazerman has observed that ”... to write science is commonly thought not to write at all, just simply to record the natural facts." This is a scientific legacy within scholarly editing as well. Further, the transmission that both scholarly editors and e.g. digitizers at libraries are engaged in when transferring a perceived content (such as 'text') from one document to another, can be differently recognized by the 'transmittors' as media models, i.e. as either: 1/ context-free content delivery, or 2/ interpretative and tool-dependent content manipulation, or 3/ a process that is defined by a context-dependent and content-circulating ecosystem of media. As a consequence, scholarly editing is historically a field where conflicting ideals battle: on the one hand, the ideal that the edition (bordering on 'archive') should strive for total exhaustiveness, uniformity, perfect mimetics and universal tools; on the other, that editions should recognize and be valued for their authority to select and deselect, explain and interpret, define and constitute. This paper will looks at some of these models and ideals that might seem to be in conflict, and specifically discusses to what extent they are prolonged or even boosted (= tradition), or perhaps changed or even annihilated (= innovation) within the realm of digital scholarly editing. And if the two fields of scholarly editing and library activities (such as digitization and metadata scheme production) are increasingly brough closer to one another, how does that development fit with the aforementioned models and ideals?

If publicly funded libraries (PFL) such as national libraries were to adopt a more open source approach when making digitized cultural heritage (CH) material available, users would be granted not only open access to delivery files at a surface level (in e.g. PDF, JPG, or XHTML) but ”deep access” to archival file material and technical documentation as well (such as TIFF, full XML/TEI, scripts, style sheets and machine instructions). PFL:s would thereby strengthen the force behind the values of equal access, of supporting education and research, and of distributing not only digitized material but competence and methods as well. They might also come one step closer to sharing information-rich material with other digitizing institutions by constructing valid banks of commonly and mutually accessible digitized CH material. As of yet however, this is far from the case. Many PFL:s are rather adopting a policy to restrict public access to light-weight delivery versions while charging users for access to the archival, deep level (or hiding it away altogether). This paper examines some of the arguments for such a restrictive policy and discusses feasible ways of bypassing some of the open source obstacles.

The paper highlights and discusses concepts and practices of national library digitization. Two conceptual models are suggested in order to help strengthen scholarly analyses of digitization practices within libraries: the distinction between quantitative and qualitative digitization, on the one hand, and the prism metaphor for understanding the nature of qualitative digitization, on the other. Qualitative digitization, understood as a document representational practice, is defined as a knowledge organization practice. These concepts and models are then put in relation to the issue of national libraries and institutional identity. By combining research within the fields of KO, digitization and institutional identity, the paper points to a way of addressing empirical issues in all three fields of research. Special focus is on the very definition of qualitative digitization as a KO practice and the practice of selecting and digitizing documents suitable for the development of institutional identity within libraries.

The thesis investigates in what way the scholarly edition performs bibliographic functions as it manages and positions other documents. This is where the study differs from previous research on scholarly editing and bibliography. It aims to trace the boundary between scholarly editing and bibliography by comparing crucial objectives, problems and conflicts in each field. This is accomplished by identifying the argumentation, assumptions and conceptual frameworks that form the rationale for the fields, and subjecting them to qualitative critical and historical analysis. The main empirical material is editorial theory literature, with scholarly editions serving as illustrating examples. Key questions concern the way scholarly editors and bibliographers identify, define and reproduce their respective source material; the reasons for conflicts between editors’ varying expectations of the reproductive force in printed and digital editions; and the connections and demarcations between scholarly editing and bibliography and between scholarly editions and reference works such as bibliographies. Bibliographic and media theory form the basis for the theoretical framework, with additional input from book history, literary theory, genre studies and scholarly communication studies. The thesis suggests a distinction between the two activities of clustering and transposition, and the distortion the latter brings about. These concepts are employed to detect, group and explain activities and problems in scholarly editing and bibliography, who both manage sets of documents by clustering them to one another and transposing their contents by producing new documents. There is a noticeable division of labour between the two tasks, and they also correspond to different types of editions. The study also ties the dominant editorial strategies and edition types to respective bibliographic foci, and argues that central conflict areas are primarily accentuated and only secondarily introduced with digital editing. An idealistic strand treats editing as unbiased delivery of disambiguable and reproducible content, while to a hermeneutical strand the edition is an argumentative and content constraining filter, its editor being a kind of biased author. In a third strand, editions are content circulating ecosystems with a division of labour between collaborating media types. In particular the view of editions as constitutive arguments is related to analogue observations in LIS and genre and scholarly communication studies. On the one hand, editing is supposed to be a dynamic research area, ready to respond to new findings and scholarly ideals. On the other, several arenas demand the edition to serve as a conservative force, static and confirmatory. The potential of digital media points to a distinction between edition and archive, where the former but not the latter explicitly takes an interpretative stand. Digital editing also boosts the idealistic strand by the seeming promise to separate facts from interpretation and to enhance maximum exhaustiveness and reproductivity. Although the thesis identifies many commonalities between editions and reference works and the way these are structured, there is a crucial difference. The edition is simultaneously a work’s reference and referent. Bibliographies and reference works cannot make that claim.