From manuscripts to digital cultural heritage

Digitisation is about more than creating digital copies of documents. It is a comprehensive process where conservators, photographers, librarians, historians, digital collections specialists and communicators work together to preserve, describe and make the materials accessible for the future.

The project ensures that Hans Christian Andersen's manuscripts and letters are preserved and can be explored by researchers, educators, students and anyone interested in his life and works. At the same time, the project examines how new technologies can provide new insights into the historical materials.

Below, you can get a behind-the-scenes look at the digitisation process.

Preserving Hans Christian Andersen in the collections

In the first part of the digitisation flow, conservators review all materials to ensure they can be handled during the photography process and that the digital images are of the highest quality possible. Materials are preserved as needed - for example, tears in the fragile paper or damage from iron gall ink, which can degrade the paper over time. There may also be surface dirt that needs to be removed, or curled pages that need to be straightened in order to make the text easier to read.

The Hans Christian Andersen collections at Royal Danish Library have been conserved and repackaged on an ongoing basis over many years. In the project Hans Christian Andersen's Manuscripts and Letters Online: World Heritage for All, however, all sub-collections are systematically reviewed as part of the preparations for digitisation.

Behind the camera: Digitisation

When our library digitises Hans Christian Andersen's manuscripts and letters, we take photographs with high-resolution cameras. We use this method rather than scanning the material. The method is gentler on the, often fragile, originals and makes it possible to reproduce the small details in the paper, ink and handwriting. The process is called retro-digitisation, converting analog cultural heritage materials into digital representations.

During the photography stage, we use special equipment such as weights, plexiglass rods and elastic materials to stabilise the fragile documents. This is especially important because Hans Christian Andersen's manuscripts and letters often contain glued patches, seams and folds. This also means that a single page might require multiple snapshots.

Our photographers use reference rulers and colour targets to check exposure, LAB values and colour space, ensuring high colour accuracy and providing documentation so that the digital reproductions closely match the originals. Each photograph is assigned technical metadata on the camera, lens, exposure and colour profile, documenting the image and ensuring a consistent, traceable digitisation process.

Cataloguing in the library system

Before we are digitising Hans Christian Andersen's manuscripts and letters, we review thousands of archival documents to add elaborate metadata. Our research librarians obtain metadata information through catalogues and research literature. In some cases, we create entirely new manuscript descriptions based on the original works. This ensures that each manuscript or letter can be assigned metadata at work level. Which in turn will make it easier for future users and researchers to find the material.

Every manuscript - from long novels to the smallest of notes - are continuously made available in the library system and the library's digital collections, both as classic catalogue entries and in digital form. When the project is completed, the entire collection will be freely available online in high quality and with searchable metadata.

New digital cultural heritage

After the many thousands of pages of letters and manuscripts have been digitised in high resolution, we are securing the digital files so that they can be preserved and used in the future. We store the files in formats suitable for long-term digital preservation, following internationally recognised standards for preservation.

Copies of the files are stored in independent geographical, technical and organisational environments to protect us from losing them. In this way, we ensure that the digitisations of Hans Christian Andersen's letters and manuscripts can be preserved and used for many years to come.

New technologies and new discoveries

The project Hans Christian Andersen's Manuscripts and Letters Online: World Heritage for All comprises three pilot projects: XRF and MSI imaging analysis, and AI transcription.

XRF (X-ray fluorescence) is used to analyse iron gall ink in Hans Christian Andersen’s almanacs and diaries. The ink was made using vitriol, a mineral substance with a different elemental composition depending on its origin. As a result, each type of ink has a unique ‘fingerprint’, which we examine using XRF to investigate whether the method can be used to date manuscripts that Andersen himself did not date.

MSI (multispectral digitisation) photographs manuscripts in different wavelength ranges of electromagnetic radiation, such as ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and infrared (IR). Paper, ink, and pigments have unique spectral signatures and absorb, reflect, and emit radiation differently depending on the wavelength, which allows MSI to highlight details that are not visible to the human eye.

MSI provides spatial and optical information, while XRF shows the elemental composition of the materials. Together, they provide new knowledge about the manuscripts' materials, origin, use and state of preservation.

The AI pilot project develops a language model for transcribing HC Andersen's manuscripts and letters. We train the model on existing transcriptions and then test it on unpublished manuscripts. A selection of the transcriptions will be published after a quality check in the library system.
 

Support of the digitalisation

Royal Danish Library has received a generous donation of DKK 5.8 million from the A.P. Møller Fund. The fund support will help with the digitisation of our extensive collection of lesser-known original works and letters from Hans Christian Andersen.

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We are very grateful to have received this support from the A.P. Møller Fund. Hans Christian Andersen's writings and fantastic fairy tales mean a lot to the Danish people – we get to read them aloud as children, learn about them in school and so on. The fact that Royal Danish Library now can bring Hans Christian Andersen's manuscripts and letters to a wider audience, is therefore also of great importance for how we can further communicate our cultural heritage. We look forward to sharing Hans Christian Andersen's treasures with the public.

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The support from the A.P. Møller Fund makes it possible to explore these treasure troves and make them accessible to everyone.