Three presentations on current projects in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Time will be left for questions at the end.

The Digital Beehive — Annotations of an 18th-Century commonplace book (Doug Emery)

Since 2016, staff and students in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts have been in engaged in project to annotate the “Beehive,” the commonplace book of Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania and contemporary of William Penn. The Beehive is a complex, cross-referenced and indexed tool for storing and retrieving knowledge. The Beehive annotation project is recreating Pastorius’ navigation systems in a digital environment and releasing them as data.

OPenn data: Current projects from Philadelphia institutions (Jessie Dummer)

This presentation is an introduction to OPenn: Primary Digital Resources, a website that hosts images and metadata of cultural heritage material from Penn and contributing institutions.  It will include a look at the types of data on OPenn and how users can access that data and use it. It will also include an overview of two current grant projects that are adding data to OPenn from the Philadelphia area: For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as a Center for Medical Education, 1746-1868 and Digitizing Philadelphia’s Historic Congregations.

BiblioPhilly Data: Digitized Manuscripts in Philadelphia

In this presentation, Dot Porter will introduce the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, a grant-funded project that digitized almost 500 manuscripts from Philadelphia-area libraries. After an overview, she will discuss the data generated by the project and how it’s being made available to users.

https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/