PRINTED BOOKS GUIDE

BROWSE COLLECTION: PRINTED BOOKS AND PERIODICALS

The 'Printed Books and Periodicals' section under 'Browse Collection' contains images of every printed book and periodical used in the project.

1. The basic division is into Bengali and English.
2. Within each, images are grouped under the following heads.
   • Collected works. Images of the Visva-Bharati edition of Rabindranath’s Bengali Collected Works  (Rabindra-Rachanabali), 32 vols. + 2 vols. Achalita Samgraha.
     There is no corresponding section for English.
   • Anthologies. All collections of material previously published elsewhere as part of other volumes. Here too, there is no corresponding section for English.
   • Poems and Songs
   • Drama
   • Fiction (Novels and short stories)
   • Non-fiction (all other prose works)
3. On opening the relevant page, access the required title either by using the alphabetical click-and-open menu, or by keying the title into the search box on the left panel.
4. Once you have reached the title you want, click on it to open the images of that version. You can navigate through the images in two ways:
   • with the keyboard
   • with the toolbar (to open, click the Toolbar button on the top right)
5. This page is primarily meant for access to complete books and collections in volume form. However, individual short stories published as journal items can be accessed through গল্প. Individual poems, songs and essays published as journal items can be accessed through the ‘Journals’ tab under the collection in which it appears in the ‘Collected Works’. It is simpler to access individual items through the ‘Bibliography’ page, which also offers some extra details.

The following keyboard shortcuts are available for viewing the images:

Key	Function
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GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF TRANSCRIPTION FOR MANUSCRIPTS AND PRINTED MATERIAL

In addition to images of all manuscripts, printed books and periodicals, there are textual transcriptions (in .txt UTF-8 format) of every text. These can be accessed by clicking on the icon in the 'Bibliography/See whole table' and 'Collation' section. Manuscript transcriptions appear automatically to the right of the images.
Cells that do not have an or icon indicate items we could not obtain for inclusion.

STANDARDIZATION
Some standardization of the transcribed texts was necessary for ease of reading and incorporation in the collation program. This sometimes makes for a departure from the original appearance of the text on the page. The latter can be ascertained from the image.

• The front matter of books, such as cover, half-title, title page, dedication, list of contents have not been transcribed in most cases to avoid confusion in the collation results. Colophons printed as back matter have also not been transcribed. All this material can be viewed in the images.
• Spacing between lines, stanzas, speeches etc.:
• A single blank line has been kept between stanzas of verse but none between paragraphs of prose. Where the stanza break is not clear in the printed layout, we have sometimes applied our judgement.
• Blank lines have been left between the speeches of plays containing both prose and verse dialogue, but not with plays where the entire dialogue is in prose. This is because different parsers are being used for collation in the two categories.
• Space between headers, titles or stage directions and the main body of a text has sometimes been modified from the actual layout. The latter can be viewed in the images
• Spacing at the start or middle of a line:
• All prose paragraphs are flush with the left margin
• All lines of verse start from the left margin, even where indented in the original.
• A gap within a verse line, indicating a caesura and/or internal rhyme, is denoted by a hash sign #. Where the intra-linear spacing is unclear, we have sometimes applied our judgement in placing the #.
• Stage directions and speech-headings of plays:
• The placing of act and scene numbers, place and time of action, characters present at the start of a scene, speech headings and stage directions have been made uniform.
• Speech-headings have always been placed on the same line as the opening of the speech.
• Place, date and time of composition (usually at the end of a work) have been transcribed in a standard format irrespective of their actual position.
• Where the digital image is unclear, usually owing to damaged pages, the signs « » are used to indicate doubt about the reading.
• Misprints have been preserved in transcription. But inverted letters have been silently rectified.