Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Images © Samuel Beckett 1959 and the Estate of Samuel Beckett BDMP - Beckett Digital Manuscript Project Holding Library: Harry Ransom Centre

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), under the direction of Professor Dirk Van Hulle (Faculty of English, Oxford) and Dr Mark Nixon (University of Reading), offers a digital centralisation of the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett's works, facilitated by the technical realisation of Vincent Neyt (University of Antwerp). The project’s digital research outputs are currently being hosted and stored by the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), and the purposes of the BDMP engaging with the Sustainable Digital Scholarship service here at Oxford, was to ensure that a replication of Beckett’s work were being stored in an additional location to further guarantee the legacy of these fascinating pieces of literature.

Repository

Additionally, hosting of the BDMP on the SDS platform has ensured the retention of a good deal of functionality that currently exists on the project’s site, as well as making the collection discoverable via another channel, noting that there are copyright restrictions involved. We are also thrilled that the XML / TEI files being stored for the BDMP are natively compatible with the TEI Viewer that Oxford has commissioned and built on the platform, hopefully the first of many research projects to make use of the TEI Viewer over the coming years.

We are delighted with the support offered by the Sustainable Digital Scholarship team to ensure the long-term preservation and storage of the transcriptions, images and metadata of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. As more genetic editions of Beckett's works are added to the BDMP corpus, we hope we can continue this wonderfully efficient collaboration with the SDS team.

Professor Dirk Van Hulle
Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History