In the second episode of this four-part series, Claudine Nightingale, Publisher, and Ana Attrill-Klein, Quartex Product Specialist, both of AM, offer a closer look at AM’s First Folios Compared, an open access collection of more than 40 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Our guests explain the logistics behind the project’s digitization requirement and highlight the time and effort the digitization process demands. They also describe the variation between the institutions’ copies, from practically pristine to missing several comedies, and how that disparity offers exciting insights for research. Last, our guests chat about how the Folios are accessed on the platform, strategies for searching the site—by metadata, static content, and full text recognition—and the platform’s unique way of denoting the pages by signature marks.

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