The Writer’s Library application “Bibundina”, developed at the University of Antwerp as part of eXtant, a toolkit for digital scholarly editing, aims to provide an environment both to create and to publish an edition of a collection of books and the reading traces in them. In origin, it was created to publish an edition of a writer’s library. It could for instance be used to make an edition of Virginia Woolf’s personal library, or Toni Morrison’s, or James Joyce’s—a digital reconstruction of the books that occupied their shelves. Such an edition can contain not just the bibliographic details of those books, but also focus on the marginalia left in them by the writers, as well as include information about the books’ provenance and when they were read.

Target audience
The project’s target audience consists of people who have an interest in creating such an edition of a library and are looking for a publication environment. The only technical skill users will need is an understanding of XML: to fill up an XML document following a well-documented schema. Bibundina was written as an application in eXist-db, an open-source NoSQL XML database and application platform. Bibundina can be easily installed via eXist’s “package manager” by dropping a compressed version of the app into the dropzone. Included with the eXist installation is eXide, eXist-db’s code editor. Users can edit the Writer’s Library app’s XML files in eXide and immediately see their work visualized in the publication environment. There are just two XML files to edit: a config file in which users can give their edition a name and select which sorting and browsing categories to use, and a file called “library.xml”, the main data file in which to encode the books.
Images
Images of the books can be added. The app accommodates three different ways of incorporating images, including IIIF, which will allow scholars to create editions based on their own research data or on collections of images that have been made available via IIIF at institutions all around the world. In the book view, users can browse through the images of the pages the editor wishes to include, cover and title page, for instance, and all pages with reading traces.
Reading traces
For pages with reading traces, zone numbers appear in the left margin of the image, at the same level as their corresponding trace. Clicking on a zone number will activate two pop-up windows on the right: a cropped picture of the reading trace in question and a text box with a transcription of the reading trace, the marked passage and an extract of the passage in context.

Some admin tools have been embedded into the interface to facilitate the data input. There is a tool to help editors create a new book entry, to extract image links from a IIIF manifest and formats them into the required XML schema, and a tool that assists admins with drawing rectangular zones around reading traces on IIIF images.
Available on GitHub: the source code, the current binary release, the documentation, and the user manual.
https://github.com/eXtant-CMG/writerslibrary
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
vincentneyt (December 16, 2024). Bibundina: a Writer’s Library app. CLARIAH-VL. Retrieved February 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12yo6