Gershwind-Bennett Isaac Leeser Digital Repository

The first Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah project initiative took as its subject the dispersed corpus of Isaac Leeser's correspondence, the entire run of the Occident, and his publications.  Thanks to a start up grant from the Gershwind-Bennett Families, we began transcribing and scanning the correspondence.  Our Leeser site now contains digital images of over 2,100 original letters. Each letter has been transcribed so that it can be easily read, and each letter has been encoded using TEI, to allow for the most sophisticated type of full text search and discovery.  The entire Occident, including most of the rare advertiser wraps that originally accompanied the monthly issues, has been encoded in XML, segmented files in partnership with the National Library of Israel, and Leeser's publications have been converted from ASCII files into fully searchable OCR documents. Notably, we hired a programmer to write original code to search simultaneously across all of these types of encoded documents. 

 

Credits & Acknowledgments

 

The Leeser project could not have gotten off the ground without a generous start-up gift from Penn Library Board of Overseer Erik Gershwind, W’93 and Jackie Gershwind and Stacey Bennett, C’95. The Gershwind-Bennett Isaac Leeer project was completed thanks to two major, matching gifts from the Jesselson and Kaplan Family Foundations.  Notably, the Leeser project also received valuable help from the Lyrasis Internet Archive Initiative; The Historic Jewish Press Project, Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel, which carried out, in conjunction with the Olive Software Company, the processing of the Occident into segmented XML files.

 

The entire corpus of Leeser correspondence was encoded in TEI thanks to the team at Backstage Library Works. In particular, we would like to thank and recognize the following BLW staff: John Reese, Alicia Sell, Maritta Coppieters, and especially Nicole Arbuckle for her intensive encoding work.

I. List of Participants

 

The below list of participants includes institutional and private partners, as well as staff who have played invaluable roles in helping to realize this project. Notably, Dr. Gary Zola, the Executive Director of the Jacob Rader Marcus American Jewish Archives and Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary, have actively support this initiative.

 

• American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH
• American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY
• Michael Jesselson, New York, NY, Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project Advisory Board Member and Board member of the American Jewish Historical Society.
• Arnold Kaplan, Allentown, PA, member of the American Jewish Archives Ezra Consortium; Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project Advisory Board member, and Board member of the American Jewish Historical Society.
• Abraham J. and Deborah Karp Collection of Judaica Americana at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, NY
• Dr. David Kraemer, Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary
• Eric Kingsley, Executive Director, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY
• Professor Jonathan D. Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and Director of its Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
• Naomi Steinberger, Director of Library Services, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary
• Dr./Rabbi Lance Sussman, Congregation Keneseth Israel, Elkins Park, PA
• Oren Weinberg, Director, National Library of Israel
• Dr. Gary Zola, Executive Director of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH .

 

II. Project Team:

Principal Investigators:  Arthur Kiron, Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections and David McKnight, Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Curator of Digital Collections.
 
Arthur Kiron was responsible for developing the project vision, including:

• Identifying items for inclusion in the site
• Establishing editorial conventions and textual apparatus for the correspondence
• Overseeing the creation of the on-line transcriptions
• Producing and approving all contextual materials to be included on the site
• Participating in the development of the web design and user interface
• Partnering with Penn’s digital library teams (the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI)
• Serving as liaison with lending institutions and private lenders
• Managing rights and permissions for privately owned materials 

 

David McKnight was responsible for developing the best practices for the project including envisioning way to mark-up the letters in TEI and make the full texts of those letters searchable.  He oversaw the purchase of equipment and product software (Olive) and provided the technical oversight to realize the goals of this project, the most creative of which involves using digital technologies to search and discover otherwise invisible yet meaningful connections among a dispersed corpus of manuscript and print print materials.

 

As Technical Project Leader, David McKnight oversaw the technical production of the project.

• Establish technical specifications for images
• Establish file naming conventions
• Manage and coordinate delivery of image and text files
• Enter images into SCETI database
• Create TEI.2 (Text Encoding Initiative) DTD to mark up transcriptions in conjunction with Backstage Library Works.
• Supervise text markup
• Write XSLT Style Sheets
• Design web site
• Provide technical and infrastructure support
• Provide programming support
• Advise on XML implementation
• Acquire disk storage for Leeser archival images
• Support long term preservation of data

 

Project Manager:  Michael Overgard

   Michael Overgard was responsible for:

• Coordinating the markup of letter transcriptions in TEI with Backstage Library Works.
• Editing and quality control of all markup.
• Encoding all letters from the Karp Collection at JTS.
• Cataloging all letters, pamphlets, and print material.
• Linking all TEI files with their associated images and linking letters with related content in the Occident.
• Coordinating the digitization of Leeser correspondence and the Occident, and assisting with the processing of images.
• Researching all extant Isaac Leeser materials not held at Penn or in the collections of project partners.
• Participating in the development of the website and its search functionality.

Website Development and Design by:  Dennis Mullen
As the developer and designer, Dennis designed the look and feel of the site and created all of the graphics, including the Correspondence Distribution and Leeser Travel maps. He also wrote the html and Javascript code that is used for the navigation and user interaction with the site. For actual data retrieval from the SOLR/Lucene data index this code was copied into .PHP pages by the programmer, John DiMattia.

 

Project Programmer: John DiMattia

• Set up server to use PHP, Solr, and Solarium
• Configured Solr schema
• Wrote Scala code to extract and send TEI information from TEI xml files to Solr in JSON format over HTTP
• Wrote PHP to handle search/results

Digitization teams:

• Penn Libraries:  Chris Lippa;  Elton-John Torres; Jessica Dummer; Chandra Collins; Kelsey LeClair
• National Library of Israel:  Chezkie Kaznett.
• Tel Aviv University:  Prof. Yaron Tsur, Founder and Director of the Jewish Historical Press project.
• Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary:  Naomi Steinberger; Sarah Diamant; Dwight Primiano

 

Transcription: 

Leah Fishbane, a graduate student at Brandeis University specializing in the mid-Victorian period of American Jewish history, was hired in the Summer of 2007 to inventory and transcribe an initial representative sample of letters belonging to Mr. Kaplan.  The SCETI team set about producing high resolution digital scans of the letters. Penn also benefited from the work of senior undergraduate intern Sarah Breger, brought into the project under the auspices of Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF). In February of 2007, Fishbane, who was only thirty-four years old at the time and a mother of a four year-old daughter, died suddenly of a brain tumor.   Her tragic death and Sarah’s graduation in the May of 2007 led to a break in the transcription work.  Nonetheless, the project continued on other fronts.  Over the course of the summer of 2007, the entire twenty-six volumes of the Occident, a total of 16,128 pages, were scanned. In August 2007, the Penn Libraries received a significant gift from the Goldstein Family Foundation to support the purchase of the Olive Software suite. In January of 2008, the Penn Libraries hired two graduate students studying Library Science, Rebecca Goldman (Drexel University) and Heather Newlin (Clarion University), to re-start the transcription project.  In the summer of 2008, they were joined by a new CURF intern, Andrew Kincaid.  

 

The transcription team also benefited enormously from the participation of Louise Strauss, C'82, a Penn alum, who volunteered to work on the transcription of Leeser letters. In the Spring semester of 2008, we received, on-loan from an anonymous source, an exceptionally rich collection of 212 additional Leeser items.  In the Fall of 2012, we partnered with the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary to produce digital copies of Leeser letters in the Abraham and Deborah Karp Collection of Early American Judaica at the LJTS. 

 

All Leeser letters have been transcribed by Heather Newlin, who has also reviewed all previous generations of transcriptions and revised our final transcriptions accordingly. All Hebrew writing in the Leeser correspondence were been transcribed by Esther Lassman and entered into the final transcription files which were encoded in TEI by Backstage Library Works.

In Memoriam  

Leah Levitz Fishbane died of a brain tumor on March 1, 2007. Leah was married to Professor Eitan Fishbane, and was the mother of a four year old daughter Aderet Fishbane. A graduate student of Professor Jonathan Sarna at Brandeis University, Leah specialized in nineteenth-century American Jewish history. In the course of her work on the Leeser pilot project, she made significant contributions to the development of our cataloging template and was always a joy to work with her. Leah was transcribing the Leeser letters in the Kaplan collection in the days before her tragic death. Leah's participation in our project will not be forgotten and her memory will remain for a blessing.

 

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