Digitised Manuscripts

Flavio Marzo's manuscript highlight: Add. MS 11835 – Psalms, with Hymns

Paste down back board with mark from the original leather strap

This very interesting little book, containing the Psalms and most of the Divine Office, might be one of my favourite Greek manuscripts. While there are many ways of looking at such a manuscript, as an experienced conservator, the reason why I have chosen this manuscript is because of its physical features which are closely related to its history.

Fore edge with metal (brass) pin and clasp with leather strap

One obvious striking feature of this manuscript is its size: it measures a mere 93mm in length, 74mm in width, and 34mm in thickness – ideal to be carried around by a monk in his daily prayers. Today, the book is housed in a beautiful 20th century box manufactured in the shape of a western-style book, at the British Library. The manuscript itself, however, is still bound in its original Byzantine binding, displaying typical characteristics of this style – 'link-stitch' sewing, a back with no visible supports, wooden boards with the distinguishing V-shaped edges etc.

We know by looking at the writing that it was probably copied in the 13th century. A note on f.21v tells us that it must have belonged to the library of St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, during the 17th and 18th centuries. The front and the back boards of the box bear the emblem of the Bibliotheca Butleriana, an important collection of which the manuscript was part of, before coming to the British Library.

Head of the manuscript with “V” shaped edges of the boards and head end band

It is, however, the small physical details that disclose many more information about its rich history. A simple stain on the inside back board, for example, is the mark left by a previous leather strap. The original leather strap broke and was replaced by another, the latter made of one double strip of leather, is split in two instead been split in three as it was originally and so one of the lacing holes in the front cover was therefore left empty after the repair. I am particularly excited by the potential for new discoveries and observations to be made once images of this manuscript and many others like it are made available online. Are there, for example, other surviving manuscripts that bear the marks of the same tools, used to decorate the leather cover and could therefore lead us to the workshop that produced this manuscript? Similar comparisons on the threads used for the end bands or the style of decoration of the brass clasp might help us to better understand the origins of this wonderful book.

Flavio Marzo

Back board with lacing of the leather straps with unused hole

Team work and collaboration - guest blogging

Building a digital resource requires a great deal of team work and collaboration. The frontline teams contributing to the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, for example, include experts in the preservation and conservation of manuscripts, digital photography, digital preservation, development of information systems, website design, development and usability, project management and, of course, Greek manuscripts. Each of these teams make a critical contribution to the final output. From a Project Manager's point of view, I find it most inspiring how conversations with colleagues and friends, both inside the British Library, help me to see a different perspective on the many issues relating to the resource we are about to create.

I have asked a number of people to guest blog in the Digitised Manuscripts Blog and hope that readers find their contribution as interesting as I do. The next blog entry was written by Flavio Marzo, who has been working as  Conservator for the Greek Manuscripts Digitisaton Project since March 2009.

Vatican Library to digitise 80,000 manuscripts

Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Library, sent out an "extraordinary" Newsletter 5/2010 on 24 March (see full text as posted by the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog) announcing plans to digitise 80,000 manuscripts held by the Vatican Library. Planning and consulting, as well as testing of workflow and infrastructure, have been finalised. The Newsletter also discloses some details about the project: it is planned to be implemented in three phases over a 10 year period and will initially involve 60 staff in the first phase, incremented to over 120 staff in the second and third phases. A Metis System Scanner and a 50MP Hasselblad camera ("depending on the different types of material to be reproduced") will capture the images which will be stored as FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files, a non-proprietary file format, originally designed for the storage and transmission of mainly scientific images. The 40 million manuscript pages are anticipated (following "a rough calculation") to take up a total of 45 petabytes storage space.

I am naturally very excited about the news. This is a very ambitious project on one of the world's most important manuscript collections. I will keep my eyes peeled for any further details and developments. I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.

Which manuscripts should we digitise?

(Detail from the Golden Canon Tables, Add. MS 5111)

The obvious answer to this question is: all of them! We all want access to free digital resources, but creating them is tempered by a series of practical considerations. How can we best deliver digitised manuscripts to your desktops? One answer is to secure funding for independent digitisation projects with achievable goals. Such a series of projects has to be placed squarely within a vision and strategy. At the start of each one we have to ask ourselves: which manuscripts should we digitise next? For the first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, we chose 250 manuscripts which offered a good range of all the different types and included some notable highlights of the collection. Before the Project, these manuscripts were among the least accessible since they had not been catalogued to modern standards. We are very grateful to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for funding the first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, supporting our vision, and making our work possible.

It is, however, crucial that we also engage you. Here’s how. Contact me to answer the following question: which particular Greek manuscripts held by the British Library would you like to see digitised and why? I cannot promise that your favourite manuscript will be in the next phase, but I can assure you that your feedback will inform our decision.

Juan Garcés

Codex Nitriensis

(British Library Add. MS 17211, f.20r, rotated 90° counterclockwise to display the Syriac text by Severus of Antioch)

Sometime between the late 8th and early 9th century AD, Simeon, a monk at the convent of Mar Simeon of Kartamin, copied a Syriac text for Daniel, episcopal visitor (periodeutes) of the district of Amid in Mesopotamia (see notes in Add. MS 17211, ff. 53r and 49r). We owe to this event the partial survival of several older copies of Greek works, since Simeon reused parchment sheets from which Greek text had been scraped or washed off to copy the treatise against Joannes Grammaticus of Caesarea by the author Severus of Antioch. Today, Simeon's Syriac copy survives in two manuscripts at the British Library. The Syriac text has been rebound to reconstruct the sequence of the underlying (scriptio inferior), barely visible Greek texts of a 5th century copy of Homer's Iliad (Add. MS 17210) and a 7th century copy of the Gospel of Luke (Add. MS 17211, ff.1-48) as well as a 7th or 8th century copy of Euclid's Elements (Add. MS 17211, ff.49-53).

Add. MS 17211 is, of course, better known as 'Codex Nitriensis', betraying the fact that Simeon's manuscript once belonged to the convent library of St Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert of Egypt. Its text, containing parts the Gospel of Luke, is also known in New Testament scholarly circles under its Gregory-Aland 'number' R or 027.

Many ancient texts survive as palimpsests, the faint remains of texts on reused parchment that sometimes reappear over time or are recovered with the help of modern technology. A famous example of a Greek palimpsest and the use of cutting-edge technology used to recover the underlying text is the Archimedes Palimpsest. The Rinascimento Virtuale project (see the official site in Italy or at Hamburg University), a collaboration between 51 partners (including the British Library) from 26 European countries in 2001-4, featured a number of technological approaches to make palimpsest text readable. The image below was produced as part of the Rinascimento Virtuale project and is the result of a processing algorithm used on standard, high-quality digital images of Codex Nitriensis.

Juan Garcés

(British Library Add. MS 17211, f.20r -- the same page as above -- image-processed to make the text of Luke 9:22-33 more readable)

Greek New Testament Manuscripts

(British Library Add. MS 11300 [Gregory-Aland 478], f.8r)

As somebody with a Biblical Studies background, I am particularly looking forward to seeing a number of Greek New Testament manuscripts fully available on the web this summer. The first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, will include no less than one majuscule from the 7th century, 33 minuscules from the 10th-14th centuries, and 16 lectionaries from the 11th-14th centuries.

I am planning to post on a selection of these over the following weeks...

Juan Garcés

Beyond boutique digitisation: scaling manuscripts digitisation projects

In January 2009, the Mass-Digitization List featured an interesting discussion triggered by the question whether there are any mass-digitisation projects on medieval (or earlier) manuscripts underway in the United Kingdom. The initial posting referred to the impressive digitisation activity at the Bavarian State Library in Munich and Markus Brantl's distinction between 'boutique digitisation' and 'mass-digitisation' (see here for his presentation slides), the difference being, among other things, scale and the degree of manual input/automation. List members were quick in pointing out projects that are focusing on scale, such as the Parker on the Web Project and the International Dunhuang Project. One participant, Thorsten Schassan, questioned whether the aforementioned distinction is applicable to digitisation of manuscripts, given the difference in approaches — both in digitisation and use — to medieval (and earlier) manuscripts. I concur with this latter point.

Conversations about manuscripts digitisation seem to me often determined by the perspective from which such projects are viewed. These perspectives are often influenced by two extreme poles: on the one side is the desire for complete coverage of material and liberal user rights of digital outcomes, on the other is the concern about preservation of collection items and sustainable business models. These two extremes are, of course, not incompatible.

Perhaps one way of reframing the 'boutique' vs. 'mass' digitisation discussion is to speak of scalability, instead of scale. In terms of scale, printed books and manuscripts are incomparable, but the digitisation of both groups of material is scalable. In other words, manuscripts can be digitised following strategies and workflows that allow the coverage of entire collections and the creation of services that allow users to work on large collections and even across digitised collections. Focusing on scalability instead of scale also makes sense of the current funding climate, where larger collections have to be sub-divided into smaller fundable projects that fit into a general big-scale strategy. The Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, for example, is by Brantl's distinction a 'boutique' approach (all manuscript digitisation projects, I fear, would be). In developing and refining our workflows and systems, however, we are constantly looking for scalability, i.e. we are working on approaches that could be applied to the British Library's entire Western Manuscripts collection and are seeking to make the manuscripts available in ways that fit into the emerging digital research environment.

Juan Garcés

The British Library's Greek Manuscript Digitisation Project

The British Library has one of the best manuscript collections in the world. Its Western Manuscripts collection alone comprises over 25,000 volumes and over 50,000 papyri, charters and rolls dating from before 1600. Included in this group are 1,000 Greek codices and 3,000 Greek papyri. The British Library's vision is to make available in digital format as many of our unique and primary resource collections as possible, for the benefit of research and knowledge creation, and to ensure our heritage is preserved for future generations.

The Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, is a pilot project that will fully digitise and make available 250 Greek manuscripts by summer 2010. In achieving this goal, we are seeking to develop strategies and workflows, as well as acquire the experience in pursuing a mass-digitisation approach that can be applied to our pre-1600 manuscripts collection.

As Project Manager, I feel privileged to be involved in this project and I am looking forward to sharing the views and experiences of those who are involved in similar initiatives. I trust that this blog will achieve that goal.

Juan Garcés

Το πρόγραμμα ψηφιοποίησης των Ελληνικών Χειρογράφων της Βρετανικής Βιβλιοθήκης

Η Βρετανική Βιβλιοθήκη διαθέτει μια από τις καλύτερες συλλογές χειρογράφων στον κόσμο. Μόνο η συλλογή Δυτικών Χειρογράφων της περιλαμβάνει πάνω από 25000 τόμους, ενώ ξεπερνούν τις 50000 οι πάπυροι, οι ιδρυτικές διακηρύξεις (charters) και τα ειλητάρια (rolls) που χρονολογούνται πριν το 1600. Σε αυτή την ομάδα ανήκουν και 1000 Ελληνικοί χειρόγραφοι κώδικες, καθώς και 3000 Ελληνικοί πάπυροι. Το όραμα της Βρετανικής Βιβλιοθήκης είναι να διαθέσει σε ψηφιακή μορφή όσο το δυνατόν περισσότερες από τις μοναδικές και πρωτογενείς συλλογές της, προς όφελος της έρευνας και γνώσης, με σκοπό να διασφαλίσει τη διάσωση αυτής της κληρονομιάς για τις επερχόμενες γενιές.

Το Πρόγραμμα Ψηφιοποίησης Ελληνικών Χειρογράφων, που χρηματοδοτείται από το Ίδρυμα Σταύρος Νιάρχος, είναι ένα πιλοτικό πρόγραμμα που σκοπό έχει να ψηφιοποιήσει πλήρως και να καταστήσει προσβάσιμα ψηφιακά 250 Ελληνικά χειρόγραφα μέχρι το καλοκαίρι του 2010. Προκειμένου να επιτύχουμε τον σκοπό μας, αναζητούμε να αναπτύξουμε στρατηγικές και ροές εργασίας, καθώς και να αποκτήσουμε την εμπειρία στο να εφαρμόσουμε μια προσέγγιση μαζικής ψηφιοποίησης, η οποία μελλοντικά θα μπορούσε να επεκταθεί και στη συλλογή χειρογράφων μας που χρονολογούνται πριν το 1600. 

Ως Διευθυντής του Προγράμματος νιώθω ευνοημένος που συμμετέχω σε ένα τέτοιο πρόγραμμα. Αναμένω με χαρά λοιπόν να μοιραστούμε απόψεις και εμπειρίες με ανθρώπους που συμμετέχουν σε παρόμοιες πρωτοβουλίες. Ευελπιστώ ότι αυτό το blog  θα συμβάλει προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση.

Juan Garcés
Translated by Dimitrios Skrekas

Welcome to the Digitised Manuscripts Blog

I created this blog in order to make it possible for all those interested to stay in touch with exciting manuscripts digitisation projects at The British Library, such as the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, and to share our thoughts on all things related to digitised manuscripts. I hope to blog not only on the progress of our projects but also on more general topics associated with generating digital images of manuscripts, making them available to researchers, and pursuing old and new means of researching digital surrogates of ancient manuscripts.

I will also be joined from time to time by some of my colleagues – conservators, curators, imaging technicians, systems developers, researchers and others – who will guestblog on their experience with digitised manuscripts.

I hope you find the blog interesting and take advantage of the comments feature to let me know what you think.

Juan Garcés

Project Manager,
Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Projects