John B. Howard
University Librarian
University College Dublin
Alexander (Sandy) Wilkinson
Professor, UCD School of History
University College Dublin
The Iberian Books project has been underway since 2010, with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It has completed its goal of documenting printed books (and extant exemplars) issued from 1472 through 1700 within the Iberian sphere of influence: Spain, Portugal, and those territories that fell under their control during the so-called Age of Discovery. During the course of its development, the boundaries of Iberian Books expanded naturally as the understanding of this vast repertory of books developed. As the project approached its conclusion, the evidence base it established was used to create analytics, some of which have been integrated with the bibliographical information, while others have been published on the Iberian Books digital platform. Recent research on this repertory has also now turned to how it could be leveraged to promote and support new areas of research, not least through the creation of an image base of around 230,000 pages containing graphical components such as ornate letters, ornaments and other illustrative material as well as a discovery mechanism that exploits descriptive metadata created in part through machine-learning techniques, and an image-matching service that enables users to search for matching or similar graphics from contemporary books. Known as Ornamento, this resource represents a proof of concept for a new research tool, opening up research into the visual culture of the period, as well as assisting in the identification and dating of imprintless works. The presentation will hopefully engender discussion of Ornamento’s approach in general, identifying known issues but also identifying potential additional use cases for this technology as it develops further.