"Goslar to Grasmere" is a collaboration between the Wordsworth Trust and the English Department of Lancaster University. It demonstrates the potential for creating information resources which are based on museum collections, but which go beyond the traditional "object catalogue".

The Wordsworth Trust is a Designated collection which holds objects and archives relating to the Lakes poets. These have already been recorded using SPECTRUM-compatible ¹ recording conventions.

Some of these sources (manuscripts relating to the poems The Prelude and Home at Grasmere) were selected for an exploration of the importance of place to the writing of poetry.

The source material was re-captured electronically in two ways: by digital photography and by transcription. The transcribed material was encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) framework, and was marked up so as to show both physical features (crossings-out; insertions; blots) and subjects or themes in the poetry. The TEI transcription was stored in an XML database. This required the decomposition of the TEI documents into a suitable record structure.

The web site is generated dynamically from “web page” records, which are also stored in the database. This design allows new pages and material to be added at will. It also means that three different views of the same site can be presented: for the general public, for educationalists and for manuscript specialists.

Since this project was completed, the general approach has been extended to other parts of the Wordsworth Trust collection. Links are now being made from the “object summary” records to the corresponding TEI transcriptions. These links allow the object summary records to act as “metadata” for the TEI transcription, and support queries which combine characteristics of the source objects and features of the texts they contain. In addition, assertions from both the TEI data and the object summaries will be harvested to form a Topic Map database, which can in turn support broader historical research.