The Alcalá account book project - an interactive 18th century ledger
(Aja Teehan, Damien Gallagher, John G. Keating, Thomas O'Connor)
The Alcalá Account Book project involves the digitisation of an account book from the Irish College of Saint George the Martyr in Alcalá de Henares. The College was founded in 1649 and continued until 1785 when it was incorporated into the Irish College in Salamanca. The accounts in this volume record monthly expenditure for the years 1774 to 1781. They form part of the Salamanca archive, the records of the Irish Colleges in Spain, now housed in the Russell Library at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
This interactive text, consisting of 324 pages, allows the user to view (high resolution zoom and pan), search (filter pages based on keywords) and perform basic accounting operations using the original Spanish transcription and the modern English translation. Each page has been semantically segmented (from a ledger perspective) and associated with the XML schema thereby allowing point-and-click selection of textual segments using the images. Alternatively, users may work with text, in either language, and easily find corresponding regions in the page images.
The digital version uses Fedora Commons, Flex 3 and TEI P5 as implementation technologies. This paper will describe and critically analyse the processes, technologies, design and development decisions associated with the project.