Talk:The Repository of Arts

This project is in its very early stages and I have lots of questions. Please give me the benefit of your experience!

Goals
My goal is to create a complete set of Ackermann's Repository for use here and on other wiki-projects. I am very impressed with WikiProject Popular Science Monthly and will use that as a model going forward. It is a pilot project for me and I would like to recruit people from other wikiprojects to come here to help in proofreading and processing (or, indeed, to take over).

I would eventually like to do other similar projects with other late 18th/early 19th century periodicals, particuarly fashion journals, but also Gentleman's Magazine and the Annual Register. The former has had very little work done, only piecemeal, though most of the volumes are now available on Google Books.

Questions
This project is in its very early stages and I have lots of questions. Please give me the benefit of your experience!


 * 1) What is the consensus for best practices regarding the printer's attributions and plate numbers printed on the face of the plate? Should they be transcribed and included on the page?

djvu and image file quality
The underlying jp2 images of the djvu files at Internet Archive are not great, at least not for volume 1 (I think/hope they improve in later volumes), primarily because some of the images are unfocused. Here is an example of a plate where this is particularly noticeable, and here is an example of text that is not OCR-able, even from the underlying jp2 image.

The images at Bunka Gakuen (see below in Notes for link and instructions to find the Repository) are far, far superior. They are unfortunately not suitable for direct upload to Commons or to compile into djvus to upload to IA (then use here) without some image pre-processing. The most significant problems are that they are in two-page format so they need to be split, and also cropped. The latter must be done carefully for the plates because these images preserve the printer's attributions at the tops and bottoms of the plates, which provides important information that is frequently unavailable on images from other sources: for example, compare the January 1809 plate linked above to the Bunka Gakuen image.

Such pre-processing and uploading to both Commons and IA could perhaps be accomplished via automation, but Ineuw suggested that I might simply write to them and ask them to do it! What a great idea! With the new GLAM tools, they might upload not just the Repository but all of their books, some of which are very rare. So I will look into that and seek help for it at Commons.

In the meantime, we can use the Bunka Gakuen images to assist in our tasks here, while using the existing IA djvu set for master processing. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Bunka Gakuen image set available
If you have trouble deciphering the text because the image is unfocused, try using the images at Bunka Gakuen: click on Home, click on Title, click on R, click on The repository of arts (9th in list). The images are first presented in sets of 10, then you can click on the one you want, then you can right-click and save it or open it in a new tab and zoom in.