Digitizing the Brut

To prepare the Brut for digitizing, I began by pulling the quires, which entails going into the middle of each section and cutting the threads. As I proceeded through the book I would come upon a quire containing a parchment tacket (six in total); these were carefully un-twisted and released from the cover. Once the stitching was removed, I minimally cleaned the pages by hand, avoiding the manuscript area, and then mended the backs of the broken folios and tears with a lightweight Japanese tissue. In this unbound condition the pages were stable enough to be digitized.

Each folio was scanned on an Epson Expression 10000 flatbed scanner, with 600 ppi resolution and 48-bit color. Later, the image files were sequenced in proper order and integrated into the Dartmouth Digital Collections.