The Age of Natural History: as seen through the materials in possession of Kyoto University is a digitized collection of botany and zoology books covering the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. Engrishy flavor text aside, the site is remarkable for the high quality of the images and the motley collection of information included for each object.
Collection Principles: The collection currently consists of complete digitized books on various biological topics from the collection of Kyoto University, part of their special digital collections. Currently only 8 books are available online, but the university has plans to add several more. Metadata is available in English for about half of the books. Books themselves are in a variety of languages, Japanese, English, French, Latin, etc. Further information about the project was unavailable, at least in English.
Object Characteristics: The objects are impressive. Each book has it's own web portal, including each volume - and each web portal has a very different appearance, so my guess is that the pages were designed by disparate entities, though the book viewer works the same way for each.. Every part of the book has been scanned, including covers and endpapers, and is available on-line in very high-resolution color jpegs. It is possible to get a very high level of zoom, but navigating within the zoom is impossible. You can advance pages or choose things from an index of illustrations. I have no idea what kind of collection management software is being used, but it's very minimalistic. One caveat is that there is no search function whatsoever, the contents are presented only as a long list of links on a page for each volume.
Metadata: Sadly just okay. General citations are available and the information as to physical object holding is touched on ("Possession of Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Kyoto University"). The individual book portals list a short blurb about each book, and a lot of information about how to view the book using their software. Perhaps more data is given in the Japanese versions but I have no way of checking that.
Intended Audience: Difficult to say. The books are not searchable in any practical way, so if this exhibit was intended for scholars, it's not doing a very good job. As a resource to the casually browsing public its excellent however, delivering beautiful pictures from rare resources.
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