“The Digital Scriptorium: A Visual Union Catalog of
Medieval Manuscripts”
Charles
B.
Faulhaber
The Bancroft Library University of
California
cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu
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 <http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Scriptorium/> 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.