From the e-codices project, here’s something the history of the book can teach us going forward.

Well designed digital work will be machine-actionable, but will also be capable of expressing its content when moved to other media, even non-digital media.  Neel Smith, College of Holy Cross, Boston, MA.

The manuscript page in the photograph above comes from a copy of Plato’s “Phaedo,” the description of Socrates’ death.  Its round humanistic script belongs to a single scribe, who identifies himself in red thus, “Marcus Speegnimbergensis scriptsit“ (fol. 75).

The attribution for the image associated with this item is Pellegrin Elisabeth, Manuscrits latins de la Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève 1982, pp. 330-331. The item has a Digital Object Identifier: DOI: 10.5076/e-codices-cb-0137, which provides a fair bit of that metadata needed for Dr. Smith’s purposes.

Lesson? It might be a good idea for every book and ebook to have a DOI, but then the International DOI Foundation and its registration agencies would need to find a sustainable business model to provide easily accessed DOI-generators for everyone seeking to publish those items.

Smith’s comments on the Fondation Martin Bodmer Collection at Cologny also imply a tangential and harder question. In the absence of some persistent unique identifier like the DOI and well-provided and maintained metadata associate with it, what are the digital (but technology-agnostic) forensic tools with which we will uncover our ebooks’ “Marcus Speegnimbergensis” and the evidence of the social contexts and creative tools with which “our Marcus” worked? That’s a “poser” for the likes of Matthew Kirschenbaum and webliographic scholars to come.