Christopher Hansteen’s correspondence

This repo contains metadata for 707 scientific letters received by
Christopher Hansteen.
The letters themselves are stored in Observatoriet in Oslo.
Digitized representations are available at https://uio-library.github.io/hansteen-brev/
and in Oria Digital Collections.

License

The original catalog/inventory created by Harald Hansteen in 1877 is in public domain in Norway and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
We consider the 2004/2005 digitization as a faithful representation of the original catalog that did not add new copyright.
Any database rights that may have been induced from the creation or refactoring of the data are waived
under CC0 1.0 Universal, together with any copyright or other rights related to scripts and other files in this repository.

History

1877 Registration

The scientific correspondence after Hansteen was handed of to
Observatoriet i Oslo
after Hansteen’s death in 1873.
In February 1877 Harald Hansteen created a catalogue of 1591 scientific letters
(Fortegnelse over Videnskabelige Breve).
The material was transferred to the library of
Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics
when the new building was conceived in 1934.

2004/2005 digitization project

In 2004/2005 707 letters were digitized by Museumsprosjektet (later split into EDD og MUV)
in collaboration with the University Library,
and metadata was registered in an Oracle database.
The digitization was brought to a stop halfways because of lack of funding
and the completed part was never published as intended.

2018 conversion and cleanup

As part of a project piloting Alma Digital for storing digitized and born-digital material,
this collection was cleaned up and converted.

The folder initial_conversion contains a copy of the Oracle database tables and the
scripts used to convert it to a new JSON representation, which is now kept in src/hansteen.json
as the master representation of the metadata.

There is a separate README.md in the initial_conversion folder with some details about
the issues encountered during the initial conversion.

The structure of the JSON representation is so that it can easily be converted to other formats.

As a start, the script scripts/json2marc.py converts the JSON representation to MARC21,
as used in Alma Digital.

The scanned images are not included in this repo because of the size, but will be archived in Alma D,
and are also archived at ub-prod01-imgs.

rsync -avz --progress files/* imgs:/www/htdocs/arkiv/hansteen/files/

Metadata structure

The collection members have the following metadata structure:

id: Identifier unique to the collection
alma_id: The MMS id of the linked Alma record (UIO)
alma_representation_id: The ID of the linked Alma digital representation (UIO)
urn: Globally unique and persistent identifier
descriptive: object
    date: 
    date_comment:
    places: object indexed by role (TODO)
    agents: object indexed by role
    comment:
administrative: object
    described_by:
    described_at:
    updated_at:
    collection:
structure: list
    filename:
    label:
    filesize:
    mimetype:
    sha1: checksum

Stats

Antall brev etter avsender

3 brev har ukjent avsender.