Abstract
The Bibliotheca Eugeniana is deemed one of the most important Baroque book collections worldwide. After the death of Eugene of Savoy and its acquisition by the Austrian National Library, it became integrated into the overall collection—but without a systematic identifier in the library catalog. The project Bibliotheca Eugeniana Digital aims to make this historical collection accessible again for research and open exploration. Starting from a historical handwritten catalog and digital scans of the Austrian National Library, this project applies techniques from the Digital Humanities (HTR, machine learning) to digitize the historic catalog, to identify book covers with the historical supralibros of Prince Eugene of Savoy, and to match entries between the historical and the modern catalog. The results are made accessible in a digital edition for future research. Additionally, a collection visualization enables the visual analysis of the books’ current arrangement in the Austrian National Library, their categorical classification, and their temporal and regional origins. The visual interface also enables exploration by the wider public and aims to increase awareness of this UNESCO Memory of Austria heritage collection.
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Notes
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Together with another closely related three-volume handwritten catalog (Cod. 13963–13966).
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Transkribus German handwriting M1 - model 35909, see https://readcoop.eu/model/transkribus-german-handwriting-m1/.
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For irregular pages, e.g. with additions in-between lines, performance was slightly worse (approx. 11% word error rate), but as the catalog consists predominantly of regular pages, this error rate seems acceptable.
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Due to their high number, we could not analyze the false negatives as well within this project. See [10] for a discussion of false negatives.
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At the time of submission the mapping between the handwritten and the modern catalog is still ongoing. Therefore, the first prototype does not take the data from the handwritten catalog into account. At the time of the conference, we will be able to present a more advanced version of the prototype and also report concrete numbers.
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A virtual 3D tour of the State Hall is available here: https://www.onb.ac.at/en/museums/state-hall/visit/virtual-state-hall.
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The visualization prototype can be accessed under https://demo.mindfactor.at/eugeniana/..
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“Bey diesen allen ist aber zu bedauern, daßkein Catalogus von dieser Bibliothec heraus gekommen.” [1, p.1137].
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The machine learning algorithms, resulting data sets, and source codes will be published for re-use by the scientific community at the end of the project in October 2024.
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The project Bibliotheca Eugeniana Digital is funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences as part of the godigital!3.0 call.
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Mayr, E. et al. (2024). Bibliotheca Eugeniana Digital—Unveiling and Visualizing the Treasures of Prince Eugene of Savoy’s Library. In: Antonacopoulos, A., et al. Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15177. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72437-4_4
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