Great Parchment Book website viewed more than 50,000 times

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This week the Great Parchment Book website passed the landmark of 50,000 page views since it was launched on 30 May 2013.

In addition, the Derry Guildhall exhibition – Plantation: Process, people, perspectives – which until recently displayed an original folio of the Great Parchment Book, has had 323,033 visitors from its opening in June 2013 until the end of March 2014.

We are really pleased that the Great Parchment Book has been seen and appreciated by so many both as an original folio in Derry, and remotely through the website. There will be a further chance to see the real thing at the Great Parchment Book Day at LMA on 25 July 2014 so book your place now at http://the-great-parchment-book.eventbrite.co.uk.

2 thoughts on “Great Parchment Book website viewed more than 50,000 times”

  1. I’m sorry, I did not quite understand, the book has already passed the physical restoration or not? I was thirty years of doing restoration parchments. I worked with parchment documents of the same complexity as your book.
    It was in Russia, in the State intitute restoration created a scientific school of restoration of parchment.
    Please inform me if it’s not a secret how your conservators repair deformations on parchment. Russian restorers use some simple, effective and very gentle ways.
    Sincerely,
    Voltchkova Marina, Senior Fellow and Highly Qualified Restorer.

    • The parchment was too degraded and the 165 separate parchment membranes too shrivelled to be returned to a readable state. It was evident that traditional conservation alone would not produce sufficient results to make the manuscript accessible. Following discussions with conservation and imaging experts, it was decided to flatten the parchment sheets as far as possible appropriate to their fragile state, and to use multi-modal digital imaging to to gain legibility and enable digital access. The ultimate aim was to fully flatten the sheets digitally, however we knew from the first that this was an undertaking without a certain result as we were committed to exploring new techniques and technologies; nothing else had any chance of success. That is why we are so excited at the results we have obtained in collaboration with UCL. You can follow the process through the blog or by looking at Project History.

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