This is the last in a series of blog posts about some of the functionality you may have come across (or may not have yet discovered!) in the new Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online. Here we concentrate on the new My statacc feature.

We have now introduced functionality to enable more personalisation when using the service. If you are a subscriber you can now save, annotate and tag  individual pages, whole sections, illustrations and maps. You can use the star button to save. The label icon allows you tag items with one or two words of your choice, so that you can find them easily when you next visit  (just type your words into the box), and the post-it note to write longer annotations which are stored alongside the item.  If you are planning to coming back to a particular page, image or section, you can store information about why it is interesting, how it relates to your research or how you might want to use it.

These new features are designed to allow you to easily find and review content of particular interest to you. Tags and annotations are stored against your profile, and will remain there until you delete them. Just sign in and click on the My statacc red button on the top right of the page to find everything you have saved.

A page of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland showing personalisation features and the transcript. Screen-shot captured on Thursday 1st December 2016.

You can tag, annotate and save both sections and individual pages. Individual pages can be printed out and whole sections of the Statistical Accounts can now be downloaded as PDFs. You can even share what you have found on social media by clicking on the sharing icon and follow the links. Using these features is so easy – just click on the relevant icon and away you go!

We are particularly pleased to be able to offer such personalisation, which will help you to get the most out of your searching and browsing of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online. Please let us know what you think.

More information on all the features mentioned above, as well as others, can be found in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland Help Pages and the How to get the most out of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland online page. If you have any comments or queries please contact the EDINA Help Desk (edina@ed.ac.uk).

This is the second in a series of blog posts about some of the functionality you may have come across (or may not have yet discovered!) in the new Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online. Here we concentrate on the images and maps, as well as the transcripts found on the website.

Images and maps

The new service contains a number of illustrations and maps published with the original accounts. Your search may result in a box containing the thumbnail views of related images or maps. As a subscriber you would be able click on these to view them (in a gallery view) in a much higher resolution than before. You are also able to zoom in and out, which is fantastic to be able to do! All other relevant images are on the left-hand side of the gallery view, making it easy to scroll and browse related illustrations and maps.

There are a number of interactive maps available in the service, which we are able to feature courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. One example is the map of Scotland on the homepage, where you can click on the map to open out a larger version, and as the mouse cursor moves over the map you will see the names of counties highlighted. There are also interactive maps available on the county pages, showing each of the parishes clearly within the county and allowing you to click through to more information on the parish.

The interactive map for the southern part of Northern Part of Ross and Cromarty Shires. Screen-shot taken from the Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online on Thursday 1st December 2016.

Transcriptions

Another greatly improved feature is that of the transcripts, which are available for most pages in the Statistical Accounts. The reading quality of the transcription has been improved through rendering the text in html, making it an even more useful to aid understanding when reading the Statistical Accounts.

We hope that these new features mean you get even more out of the wonderful wealth of information found in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. More information on all the features mentioned above, as well as others, can be found in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland Help Pages and the How to get the most out of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland online page. If you have any comments or queries please contact the EDINA Help Desk (edina@ed.ac.uk).

The latest upgrade of Edinburgh DataShare, from version 2.2 to 2.3, brings in several useability improvements.

• Embargo expiry reminder
  If you want to deposit your data in DataShare, but you want to impose a delay before your files become freely downloadable, you can apply an embargo to your submission – see our “Checklist for deposit” for a fuller explanation of the embargo feature. As of DataShare v2.3, if you apply an embargo to your deposit, DataShare will now send you an email reminder one week before the embargo is due to expire. This gives you time to make us aware if you need the embargo to be extended, or to send us the details of your paper if it has been published, so that we can add those to the metadata, to help users understand your data.
• DOI added to the citation field immediately
  When your DataShare deposit is approved by the curator, the system mints a new DOI for you. As of version 2.3, DataShare now immediately appends the URL containing that DOI into the “Citation” field, which is visible at the top of the summary view page of your item. The “Citation” field makes it easy for others to cite your data, because it provides them with text which they can copy and paste into any manuscript (or any other document where they want to cite the data). Previously you would have had to click on “Show full item record” to look for the DOI in the “Persistent identifier” field, or wait for an overnight script to paste the DOI onto the end of the “Citation” field.

• Tombstone records
  We now have the ability to leave a ‘tombstone’ record in place for any DataShare item that is withdrawn. We only withdraw items in exceptional circumstances – for example where there is a substantive error or omission in the data, such that we feel merely labelling the item as “Superseded” is not sufficient. Now, when we tombstone an item, the files become unavailable indefinitely, but the metadata remain visible at the DOI and handle URLs. Whereas until now, every withdrawn item has become completely invisible, so that the original DOI and handle URLs produced a ‘not found’ error.

Cortical parcellation citation – now with DOI!

Enjoy!

Pauline Ward

Research Data Service

P.S. Many thanks to our software developer at EDINA, George Hamilton, who actually coded all these enhancements to DataShare, which uses the open-source DSpace system. EDINA’s DataShare code is available at https://github.com/edina/dspace .

This is a guest blog, written by one of our History of Art interns, Rose Hussey.

As part of my Master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh, I have undertaken an internship at the Centre for Research Collections. Throughout this term we have been preparing for the India Exhibition for summer 2017. My part in this involves cataloguing and researching nineteenth century photographic albums, filling in the gaps in the CRC’s database. During this process I have made an interesting discovery, in relation to one particular album.

Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) toured South India in the late 1850s as a government employee and photographed art and architecture that he considered to be under risk of falling into ruins. The University of Edinburgh has a good collection of these albums, with views of landscape and architecture from across India. Some of the best of these images are found in his album The Elliot Marbles, published 1858, which capture the contemporary Madras Museum’s collection of the ‘Amaravati Marbles’ (now mostly in the British Museum) from Amarāvatī Mahācaitya (or ‘great sanctuary’) in the Guntur district of India.

In fact, the University is in the rather the unique position of holding two copies of this album. These copies, one from the original University collection, the other incorporated in the collection after the 2011 merge with Edinburgh College of Art, were presumed to be identical. On a cataloguing mission, I have been going looking at these albums, and many others by Tripe, finding out as much as possible about each. Starting with the CRC’s original copy, I went through The Elliot Marbles, trying to identify the sculpture(s) in each photograph, comparing them to the actual objects now in the British museum, and putting together the narratives for every image. Particularly useful was the British Library, who have put a list of the images in their copy of the album online. Our copy seemed to match theirs precisely, so it was slightly surprising to discover that this was not the case when compared to the ECA copy!

Although these volumes only differ slightly, any disparity gives an insight into photographic practices in the nineteenth century, while also raising questions. While a single copy gives a great platform for understanding the album as an art object and an insight into documentations practices and priorities during the British Raj, two copies gives an incredibly unusual potential for comparison between editions.

Below are a few examples of how exactly these copies differed, and an indication of why this might be interesting to us.

One of the most common differences between these albums are different blacked out backgrounds. So far we cannot discover why these changes occurred. These photographs are all albumen prints, a technique that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century because of its glossy finish and susceptibility to nuanced light. Blacked-out backgrounds were a common way to make the object itself stand out on the page – particularly important for Tripe in his documentation of these marble fragments. This would have been done by painting over the negative.

Linnaeus Tripe, Miscellaneous sculptural pieces in The Elliot Marbles, 1858 (CRC copy)

Linnaeus Tripe, Miscellaneous sculptural pieces in The Elliot Marbles, 1858 (ECA copy)

These differences shows how much contemporary photographers edited their negatives, which is interesting because at the time photography enjoyed the reputation of being relentlessly truthful- it was predominantly used as a factual or un-biased recording resource.
Other differences included an extra image and a removed image in each album, including/excluding detailed views. With the added image, it could be from an original negative that just wasn’t’ included in the CRC copy, or it could be a zoomed in print of a pre-existing negative.

Linnaeus Tripe, Railing crossbar (inner face), Railing crossbar (inner face detail) and Miscellaneous sculptural pieces, in Elliot Marbles, 1858 (ECA copy)

Linneaus Tripe, Railing crossbar (inner face) and Miscellaneous sculptural pieces, in Elliot Marbles, 1858 (CRC copy)

Then there are also formatting differences, which reinforce that each page was done by hand, the photograph stuck in with adhesive and then individual folios placed together and bound.

Linneaus Tripe, Inner face of railing pillar (upper portion) and Inner face of railing pillar (lower portion), in The Elliot Marbles, 1858 (ECA copy)

Linneaus Tripe, Inner face of railing pillar (upper portion) and Inner face of railing pillar (lower portion), in The Elliot Marbles, 1858 (CRC copy)

Furthermore, the measurements of each photograph were different in both albums, reinforcing the fact the each photograph would have been individually printed from the negative and then hand cut. Such differences, while individually small, reveal the individuality of these albums. An opportunity such as this, side-by-side comparison, is very rare and has yielded some interesting outcomes.