Chopping up rare books and manuscripts does not bother Will Noel, University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and founding director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. On the contrary, he is all for it, and even encourages the practice—in the digital form, of course.

Noel is a champion of open data and a vocal advocate of freely sharing content from materials owned and housed by libraries, museums, and cultural institutions. His goal for Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript collection is to digitize it and make it as broadly available as possible.

“The Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania is at the forefront of open data in cultural heritage collections,” says Noel. “We are gearing up for an entirely new generation of usage in special collections.”

The Kislak Center and Schoenberg Institute are housed in the recently renovated fifth and sixth floors of Penn’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. The spaces have been specially redesigned to allow different groups to simultaneously interact with objects of study, expand the use of primary resources, and for the development of new technologies for information discovery, digitization, and dissemination of the collection for the larger scholarly community.

Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript collection includes around 400,000 printed books and nearly 15,000 linear feet of manuscript material, ranging from ancient texts and medieval manuscripts, to a collection of American theatrical posters from the 1890s and the archives of John Mauchly, who built the ENIAC computer.

“We are a very well-used special collections center. Since we have made our data available in the digital world in innovative and unusual ways, we have seen a great uptick in usage and that is exciting,” Noel says. “People are using our collections around the globe, with the public adding to the information we have about our collections.”

An art historian and medieval manuscript scholar, Noel deeply appreciates the value of the primary source as a unique and rare object, and asserts that making the source’s content available via open data is likely to keep the data and collections alive.

Handing over assets for others to use for free and without restriction, Noel says, “often leads to new research and new results and allows us to see things in interesting ways.

“Custodians of collections are used to working with them in controlled ways and normally behind locked doors, but the way to make data survive is to give it away,” says Noel. “With the case of a medieval manuscript, it is an archival document. It must be handled very carefully in a restricted environment in restricted ways. In a digital world you can take a digital object and can cut up its pages.”

Embracing open data, says Noel, “does not mean neglecting traditional skills and maintaining the original materials. They show people history as the real thing. But we also want to reach new audiences and do things with the collections that we can not possibly do with original artifacts.”

One example of how sharing a digital image and information from the collection can introduce many first-time users to the Kislak Center’s collections was the discovery of “Rocket Cat.”

Mitch Fraas, a curator in Digital Research Services at the Kislak Center, came upon a startling image when going through one of the collection’s medieval manuscripts. It was a treatise that proposed tying a rocket to the back of a cat and firing it over barricades toward an enemy. He wrote a blog post about Rocket Cat that was soon picked up by The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and others, and was shared via social media. Within a matter of days, the story had been read and shared more than 25,000 times.

In another instance, a digital image posted to Penn Libraries’ Flickr page generated a comment about the owner of a book whose name appeared in the inscription. The image’s metadata led the grandson of the book’s original owner to the image and to further knowledge on the book’s provenance, linking it to a former Wharton student who left the book behind when the student returned to Havana, Cuba in the 1930s.

This type of interaction, says Noel, points to how open data “builds a community of alumni and all sorts of people who are engaged in helping us add meaning to our collection.”

Digitization of the collection benefits those on campus, as well, Noel adds.

“When a Penn student comes to the Kislak Center, they can handle the original artifact, they can download professional images of it, use it in a class paper, compare it to materials in the collections of other institutions,” Noel says. “They can study and restudy these items whenever, wherever.”

Digitizing the collection is a vast undertaking. The process involves cataloguing materials and manuscripts, creating a bibliographic record of the object with metadata, and digitizing it in the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image.

“The results are seen, for example, in the full facsimiles of manuscripts with metadata, available on “Penn in Hand,” says Noel.

The digitization process is done very carefully.

“There is a conservation review before and after the book is imaged and if it is in bad shape, we’ll conserve the material before we digitize it,” says Noel. “This reduces the risk of damage to the original material. Then we make it available in a form that is truly useful to people at a high resolution for anyone to use for any purpose.”

Penn’s rare book and manuscript collections serve 375 classes and more than 5,000 students, faculty, and outside researchers annually. Via open data and the sharing of its digital content, as well as through library blogs and social media, the collection is reaching a global community of scholars and users.