Havens, Earle, PI. The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR). Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries; London: Centre for Editing Lives and Letters; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Library, 2019. Accessed 16 June 2025. archaeologyofreading.org. The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) is an impressive, multi-partner project that offers a rich set of resources for studying marginalia in selected books from the collections of two English scholars: Gabriel Harvey (d. 1630) and John Dee (d. 1609). The project  s central digital tool, the   AOR viewer,   is a relatively dynamic online environment that combines IIIF and Mirador image viewing software with enhanced metadata to create a searchable framework for deciphering and grouping manuscript notes. By reconstructing and digitizing 36 items from Harvey  s and Dee  s historical libraries, the project radically improves the accessibility of these heritage resources, uniting objects from across the globe and making their material histories legible for new groups of readers. The AOR is helmed by scholars working at the heart of academic bibliography: situated under the auspices of Anthony Grafton and the late Lisa Jardine, the project is headed by Earl Havens, director of Johns Hopkins   Virginia Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance and the Sheridan  s curator of rare books and manuscripts. It is also a collaboration between University College London  s archival research group, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and two high-profile rare book libraries: the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University Library. These credentials are reflected in the ambition of the project  s resources, which present a powerful use case for the benefits of investing in enhanced metadata and image display tools to expand and democratize the study of early modern material-textual culture. In addition to the digital library and image viewer, the AOR main site houses a series of high-level resources including essays, bibliographies, and pedagogical tools, all of which offer convincing contextualization for the project  s scholarly aims. These are incarnated in the viewer, which combines IIIF and Mirador multi-image viewing software in a dynamic desktop experience that allows users to study and compare up to 25 items within the same window. The incorporation of the usual suit of IIIF tools allows for the display of detailed metadata alongside the digitized images. Where the AOR offers Early Modern Digital Review 8.1 (2025) 2  Early Modern Digital Review  3  genuinely revolutionary levels of detail is in its transcriptions and translations of marginal notes, which can be filtered with a powerful word search function to identify particular themes across the 36 digitized books. This search tool is particularly strong in relation to the proper names of people and places, which the AOR   archaeologists   have grouped into interlinked categories. This sizeable intervention into the study of early modern readers   marks is slightly hampered by the fact that these searches are not linked to regions in the image or to lines in the metadata, which means that a user must scroll through all the transcriptions on a single page to find their search query and then manually locate that note on the digitized page. Developing a more dynamic highlighting system would speed up the process of locating the notes. Indeed, exciting further developments could be made through the use of computer vision technologies such as automatic feature recognition. Investing in image segmentation and annotation alongside optical character recognition (OCR) would facilitate the expansion of the corpus (allowing for the automation of parts of the transcription process) and permit users to undertake word-based searches within the digitized images, enhancing the overall user experience. Since the printed texts are not currently part of the transcription data, such technologies could also be used to enrich the available metadata and allow for more detailed study of the interrelations between the marginal notes and the printed texts. The 36 books included in the digital library are well contextualized by strong general descriptions. These are not located within the viewer but can be found on the main site under   The Books and Their Readers.   Many of these descriptions are highly detailed, and some even have bibliographies of their own. This cataloguing is not, however, consistent across the corpus, and the book descriptions also tend to focus on the texts and their authors with little discussion of the physical state of the copies; provenance, for example, is generally overlooked. Indeed, the selection of items in the AOR viewer as a whole does not appear to have been undertaken according to a specific critical paradigm. Naturally constrained to the Anglo-European context in which Harvey and Dee operated, the limitations of the corpus are exacerbated by the fact that the books chosen for digitization seem to have been drawn into the resource for primarily practical reasons, including the availability and costs of digitized images and the amount of marginalia in the copies, with a preference for multi-bound volumes. This lack of thematic coherence disrupts  4  Early Modern Digital Review  some aspects of cross-copy analysis, making it difficult to compare the two libraries in any sustained way. But the current selection of books does succeed in providing a potent case for the project  s methods and scholarly aims. Strong and convincing contextual work is also carried out by the excellent resources housed on various pages across the main site (including on the   Downloads   page as well as the slightly less useful   How to Use AOR   page). Worthy of note are the biographies of Harvey and Dee; the histories of their libraries; the suggestions for further reading; and an essay titled   What Is the History of Books?   by Matthew Symonds and Earle Havens. This critical historiography of the study of the book convincingly situates the AOR project within the material and sociological turns that have revitalized the study of book objects as resources in the analysis of reader response. Many of these resources, however, require extensive navigation to locate, and some of the project  s most interesting findings can only be downloaded in the form of PDFs and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Displaying this data within the site itself and linking it into the AOR viewer would enhance the user experience. The flexibility of the digital environment could also be better exploited to offer diachronic reflections on the histories of the collections. For example, a map of the movements of the books over time would provide an interesting addition to the descriptions of the respective libraries, among which Kristof Smeyers and Jaap Geraerts  s   History of Harvey  s Library   is particularly rich. Equally, incorporating the book descriptions (currently located on separate main site pages) into the AOR viewer would improve the availability of key information, utilizing a function of IIIF that is well deployed in comparable initiatives such as the Cambridge Digital Library and Manchester Digital Collections. At the level of ideation and enhanced metadata, AOR presents an exemplary digital humanities project that offers a powerful model for similar initiatives and provides a fruitful framework for enhancing other digital libraries with detailed, page-by-page metadata transcriptions, all of which are open access. Even through the AOR archive is itself still somewhat provisional, the fact that its search tool does not entirely facilitate the process of reading the digitized images means that using the AOR viewer is still a fruitful bibliographical act  one that requires close reading and a certain level of palaeographical skill. An intervention into the history of ideas as well as the study of the book, the detailed, searchable transcriptions in the AOR viewer offer a potent test case for  Early Modern Digital Review  5  the idea that patterns and practices of knowledge consumption and information management might be discovered in the marks left by early modern readers in their books. Expanding the corpus and offering copy-specific descriptions of the material state of the copies (not just their marginalia) would enrich the project  s research aims, fulfilling a slightly underdeveloped aspect of the AOR  s   archaeological   method, which treats the page as layered historical ground. Improving the interlinking of the resources between the viewer and the main site and investing in computer vision technologies would present exciting developments, speeding up the identification and categorization of the marginalia and facilitating the use of the AOR  s rich resources for scholars of early modern reading practices and students of Renaissance Humanism alike. Rebecca Bowen University of Notre Dame