You bring the collection and the knowledge of it. We do the reading, the translating, the tagging and the building, and your staff decide what goes out under your name.
Every project begins with a slice of your own collection, ideally including the awkward ones: the damaged pages, the unusual hands, the languages nobody on staff reads. We publish that slice properly, and you decide what comes next with your own books in front of you.
The catalogue, reader and search are the same in every route. What changes is how much of your website is involved, and you can move from one to the next as the collection grows.
Rosa mystica1885
Gott ist die reinste Liebe1826Search, the catalogue and the reader appear in the pages you already publish. Your web team adds a tag; your site stays in charge of everything around it.
How a museum does it
A home for the collection at an address of yours, in your identity, with its catalogue, reader, plates and librarian. Your main website links across.
A library of its own
When the collection is the public face of the institution, we design the whole site around your material: the front door, the reading and the exhibitions.
Transcription, translation and tagging are drafted by machine and checked by the people who know the material. Nothing is published until your staff have seen it, and every change is kept.
Fable represents to us the maiden Hesione ready to be devoured by a sea monster, whom Hercée delivers after having killed this dragon.
Machine draft · one name uncertain…whom Hercée delivers… original: “Hercée”, likely referring to Perseus or a variation of Hercules
Note added by a reader of the textThe line goes out with its note, and the earlier version stays in the history.
Revision 2 · approved
TIFFs, JPEGs, PDFs, mixed resolutions, folders that grew over the years. Putting them in order is part of our work.
| Shelfmark | Title | Year |
|---|---|---|
| PH 400 | Livre des figures… | 18th c. |
| PH 205 | Elementa Chemiae | 1720 |
| BPH 131 | Book of Hours | c. 1490 |
| PH 237 | Gott ist die reinste… | 1826 |
MARC, Dublin Core, a spreadsheet, or whatever your system produces. Your records stay recognisable to the people who wrote them.
A colleague who knows the collection and can answer questions about naming, languages and priorities, usually for a few hours a week.
Scans, records, transcriptions, translations and tags belong to your institution. Everything is published in open standards and can be exported at any point, so the collection outlives any supplier, including us.
Folium grew out of a public library of ancient and early modern texts that we still run. Publishing twenty thousand books meant building every stage ourselves: bringing in files from archives that each name things differently, reading early type and unfamiliar hands, translating with the original always in view, and making a phrase findable across the lot.
Institutions then asked for the same for their own holdings. A museum in Amsterdam wanted its catalogue searchable and translated inside its own website. That became the work we do now.
Send a slice of the material and whatever export you have. We publish it and talk through what the full collection would involve.
