This poster examines the technical background to the Stationers’ Register Online (SRO) project based at the University of Oxford.

The pilot SRO project received institutional funding from the Lyell Research Fund to transcribe Arber’s and Eyre and Rivington’s editions of the book-entry Register of the Stationers’ Company, (1554 to 1640, and 1640 to 1708).

The Stationers’ Register is arguably the most important primary source for the study of the history of the book in Britain other than the books themselves. The Register was the primary means through which ownership of texts was asserted, disputed, regulated and monitored from c.1577 until 1924, and survives intact in two series now held in Stationers’ Hall and at the National Archives.

As part of the preparation for the digitisation of the earliest volumes of the Register by a keying company, the project created a byte-reduced encoding schema for concise digitization without loss of intellectual content. The motivating factor for this is that the keying company charges per kilobyte of output. While XML output was desired, there were significant savings to be had from reducing file size: around a 40% reduction. The transformation stylesheets to convert the transcriptions to "pure" TEI P5 XML from the reduced version created for the project also included automatic recognition and transformation of dates, and fees in Roman numerals.

The poster will examine the creation of this schema and the benefits and challenges of converting basic presentational markup to richer semantic encoding. Additional technical topics under consideration for this poster will be the management of encoding guidelines for the keying company, and quality assurance and additional editorial input, such as disambiguating names, of the resulting data that they provide. The poster will also include an overview of the data’s potential uses: enriching bibliographical databases, such as the English Short-Title Catalogue, and book-historical databases, such as the London Books Trade.