The Digital Scriptorium: A Visual Union Catalog of Medieval Manuscripts

paper
Authorship
  1. 1. Charles B. Faulhaber

    Bancroft Library - University of California Berkeley

Work text
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The Digital Scriptorium: A Visual Union Catalog of
Medieval Manuscripts

Charles
B.
Faulhaber
The Bancroft Library University of
California
cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Digital Scriptorium intends to establish the technical and organizational
framework for a visual union catalog of medieval manuscripts. It was created by
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, and the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library of Columbia University. See <> for a detailed
description of the project.
The Digital Scriptorium is designed to solve two primary problems for
medievalists: (1) locating the corpus of manuscript materials required for
carrying out a given research or pedagogical project; (2) attempting to tie
those materials to a concrete time and place. For this there is simply no
substitute for visual inspection. Since most manuscripts of cultural interest
(literary, legal, scientific, religious, philosophical, etc.) are not dated or
localized, they provide little evidence for knowledge of a specific text in a
specific place and time, i.e., for precise cultural or literary history.
Thus a long-felt need of medieval scholars is a repertory of dated and datable
manuscripts that can be used to establish a taxonomy by which undated and
unlocalized manuscripts can be tied to specific geographical and chronological
coordinates. The classical method of paleographical training is to study a
series of photographic or printed facsimiles, accompanied by transcriptions, in
order to learn the characteristics of the various scripts as well as how to read
them. Facsimiles are used because few university libraries have large
collections of original manuscripts.
Heretofore these problems, finding source materials and, once found, examining,
dating, and localizing them, have been attacked using paper-based reference
tools (e.g., the several Catalogues des manuscrits
datés). The computer and the web make possible a better solution to
the long-standing scholarly problems adumbrated above; and it was the perception
of that solution that lay behind the genesis of the Digital Scriptorium project.
As we began to conceptualize a digital database of medieval manuscripts, we
identified the following significant criteria:
1. Heretofore these problems, finding source materials and, once
found, examining, dating, and localizing them, have been attacked using
paper-based reference tools (e.g., the several Catalogues des manuscrits
datés). The computer and the web make possible a better solution to the
long-standing scholarly problems adumbrated above; and it was the
perception of that solution that lay behind the genesis of the Digital
Scriptorium project. As we began to conceptualize a digital database of
medieval manuscripts, we identified the following significant
criteria:
2. Standards: One of the curses of the electronic age is the lack of
standards and the concomitant inability to exchange information
transparently among different systems. One of the great achievements of
the international library community has been the creation of the MARC
format as the standard means of exchanging bibliographic information.
With medieval manuscript collections found all over Eastern and Western
Europe and in both Americas, the same sort of standardization (of
various kinds) is required.
3. Extensible and updatable: Given the immense variation in
technological sophistication among libraries holding medieval
manuscripts, it was evident that any union list would have to be created
incrementally, with the more technologically advanced institutions
taking the lead and providing the tools so that other institutions could
add their own materials when it became technically and economically
feasible for them to do so. Similarly, it is necessary to assume that
manuscripts described at the beginning of the project might need to have
their descriptions updated on the basis of information added later by
other institutions.
4. Distributed: The logistics of centralizing all of the descriptive
information about medieval manuscripts in a single repository are
formidable. What is needed is a framework and a set of standards that
will make it possible for institutions that hold medieval manuscripts to
make information about them available as part of a distributed process,
just as information about local holdings of monographs and serials is
made known through the various national and international
bibliographical utilities.
5. Digitized facsimiles: Text descriptions of medieval manuscripts are
inadequate, and published catalogs, for cost reasons, can only provided
black-and-white facsimiles of a limited number of manuscripts. While
there is a good consensus on how a manuscript ought to be described, the
descriptions omit features that cannot be described textually yet which
are of great importance for comparative purposes. An example: A great
deal of effort has gone into the nomenclature of medieval scripts; yet
even scripts with exactly the same name are often quite different
visually. The user can extract information from an image that would take
a cataloguer days to encode or cannot be encoded at all.
6. Commercial software: Projects like this one cannot afford the
maintenance costs of locally developed software. With the use of
industry standard encoding methods (i.e., SGML), the Digital Scriptorium
can use commercial software for both encoding and display.
7. Revenue: A project like this must generate income in order to make
it viable in the long term. Participating institutions should be
recompensed for the use of their images in the catalog; while the
project ought to generate enough funding so that it can offer seed money
to institutions as an inducement to participate.

Thus our goal is to establish an internationally-accepted framework for the
eventual creation of a comprehensive database of medieval manuscripts, in short,
a world union catalog, access to which would be available through a fee-based
system. In order for this project to be successful it must command the
participation of the community of scholars and librarians who use and catalog
medieval manuscripts as well the cooperation of libraries holding significant
quantities of medieval manuscripts. It must be collaborative in the best sense
of the word. This is why we enlisted the support of distinguished scholars and
manuscript cataloguers from the U.S. and Europe to design a data model that
responds to the needs of medievalists as well as to the exigencies described
above. Our modus operandi has been explicitly
modeled on the process that led to the successful establishment of the Encoded
Archival Description as an international standard for the description of
archival collections.

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Conference Info

In review

ACH/ALLC / ACH/ICCH / ALLC/EADH - 1999

Hosted at University of Virginia

Charlottesville, Virginia, United States

June 9, 1999 - June 13, 1999

102 works by 157 authors indexed

Series: ACH/ICCH (19), ALLC/EADH (26), ACH/ALLC (11)

Organizers: ACH, ALLC

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  • Language: English
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