[Mediaevistik] Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

[Graeme Dunphy]

Albrect Classen hat mich gebeten, folgende Mail an die Liste
weiterzuleiten.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen.

g.


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Interesting project at UCLA described in the Chronicle of Higher
Education:
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3606/a-digital-window-on-the-me
diev
al-world\

Thousands of medieval manuscripts have been digitized by libraries
around
the world. The trick has been finding them. Matthew Fisher, an assistant
professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles,
thought
up a solution: the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval
Manuscripts,<http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/>a centralized online
archive
of holdings around the world.

For decades, even centuries, scholars have had to find their way around
library holdings using shelfmarks, unique identifying numbers assigned
to
each document - a kind of Dewey Decimal System without a unifying
organizational principle, according to Mr. Fisher. The catalog will pull
many of those records into one spot, so that researchers who cannot hop
on a
plane to faraway libraries can still get their hands, virtually, on
manuscripts they want to work with.

So far Mr. Fisher and his team have found as many as 5,000 digitized
manuscripts they want to include. As of February 9, 1,024 of those had
been
entered in the catalog. Two grad students help vet each entry and figure
out
what categories it belongs in. Mr. Fisher acknowledges that for now the
archive focuses mostly on Western European and North American holdings,
but
he hopes to marshal the scholarly expertise to bring in more records
from
other parts of the world.

....