Mitch Fraas shared his project leveraging library data “to visually display networks of provenance in our manuscript collection” at the University of Pennsylvania. Fraas offers insights on how he was able to transform MARC records into a visual map to learn more about previous owners of some of Penn’s manuscript collections and shares some of his future plans:
Finally and perhaps most exciting of all, I’m just now in the process of working through the data and the visualizations to suggest manuscripts which, in the absence of visible or recorded evidence, might have been owned by a particular person or institution based on similar chains of provenance. I hope to make all of this data available through our institutional repository at some point and I’d love to hear from others engaged in similar projects – and I hope this piece will encourage others to begin taking a look at how they might be able to use the detailed metadata created by generations of librarians.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Julie Adamo, Emory Johnson, Chelcie Rowell, and Krista White (Editors-at-large for the week), Caro Pinto (Editor for the week), and Zach Coble and Roxanne Shirazi (dh+lib Review Editors).