The World of Peter Stuyvesant: Digitisation for Education and Research Hans Mulder
Notes:
Digitisation projects are expensive and time consuming. For that reason a good selection strategy is very important. With this thought in our minds we looked closely at the main objectives of the University Library. The library is a keeper of the University’s cultural heritage and provider of information services for its research and education community. Thus emerged in 1997 “The World of Peter Stuyvesant”.
In “The World of Peter Stuyvesant”, the Utrecht University Library worked closely together with the History Department. Based on the nineteenth-century bibliography of Georg Asher, twenty, mainly seventeenth-century descriptions of New Netherland were chosen to be digitised and by means of OCR and plain typing put into computer readable text. These texts and the digital images of the books were used in a doctoral seminar taught by the History Department (from January until July 1999). The teachers and students used a version of WebCT, which was revised by the University Library. The project resulted in a web site. Eight of the twenty books, the annotations of the students and their papers can be found on the beautifully designed site: http://stuyvesant.library.uu.nl/stuyvesant/ (in Dutch).