Out of copyright for a thousand years...

October 22, 2022 3:33 PM

Is it possible (or how do I) obtain a high-quality image file of a page in a digitized manuscript in the British Library collection?

So there's a fabulous illumination in a manuscript that has been digitized by the British Library. It's here, folio 34 recto, in case it helps. It *seems* like the BL will provide digital files (and perhaps sometimes prints) according to some lanugage on this page, but that link they provide just leads to a 404 death spiral.

Ultimately I'm after physical prints, but for now I'd like to focus on the question of "how to get the high resolution file". I do not expect that the file (or the service of providing it to me) will be free. Librarians, researchers, savvy shoppers of MetaFilter, help?

posted by janell to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

Best answer: Are you looking the illustration of a woman with a free-standing distaff from the Book of Hours in which a cat has caught her spindle in midair? The British Library page I link to will let you purchase a digital version of the image, but I am not confident that the version you will receive will be as high resolution as the version provided by their web viewer (which, under the hood, is assembled with an image tiling technique borrowed from displaying maps in web browsers) .
posted by RichardP at 3:52 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The 'correct' link is accessible elsewhere -
https://www.bl.uk/digitisation-services/services/ordering-images
- hopefully that will get you a little closer to ordering the image you want.

I handle exactly this kind of request all the time in the archives where I work, but I am in a much smaller organization (in addition to permissions, I also perform the digitization & cataloging, too, whew).
posted by niicholas at 3:56 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

I would just take a bunch of screenshots of that image at max resolution in the web viewer that RichardP linked above, then fit them together in Photoshop or some other image editing program.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:22 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I put an AI-enhanced version of the image on my Google drive for you if it helps at all. It's large enough to be printed at 20+ inches tall.
posted by chudmonkey at 6:02 PM on October 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

There's a webapp called Dezoomify that does exactly what you want. Here's a direct link to that page as a single image (4603x6251 pixels), assuming RichardP assumed correctly.
posted by neckro23 at 5:55 AM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

I found that there's software on github that purports to do this. I'm trying out this script now on the link that RichardP gave, but it is taking awhile as it seems to be downloading 581 pages... I'll drop back with a result if it finishes.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:35 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

resolution 13 jpeg of stowe_ms_17 page f034r, which is also page 84 by counting produced by python3 bl.uk.py --resolution 13 stowe_ms_17 --pages 84:84

Image specifics:
pics/13/stowe_ms_17/stowe_ms_17_f034r.jpg JPEG 4637x6299 4637x6299+0+0 8-bit sRGB 6.33659MiB 0.000u 0:00.000

posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 8:19 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks all! I was after a path (and a method) through the BL rather than around them, but I appreciate all of you and your resourcefulness and generosity!
posted by janell at 10:42 AM on October 23, 2022