| Author | Post |
|---|
Alan Pritchard
Guest
| Joined: | |
| Location: | |
| Posts: | |
| Status: |
Offline
|
|
Posted: Wed Feb 11th, 2009 01:40 pm |
|
Nothing immediately alchemical (to my eye), but could be worth a return visit occasionally, if it is kept up to date.
THE WIRED CAMPUS
A daily glance at education-technology headlines for Tuesday, February 10.
A service of The Chronicle of Higher Education
...
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3606
"A Digital Window on the Medieval 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. Mr. Fisher and his team have found 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 the archive so far 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. Eventually, the site will have a collaborative layer of some sort, so that scholars can share their expertise with other researchers and with libraries, which do not always have the most accurate information for each manuscript, according to Mr. Fisher. He'd like the catalog to provide a general set of digital tools, too, so that similar databases can be built in other fields. But how many people really want to know where they can get a peek at, say, the Gospel of John presented to Charlemagne around 800 and now lodged in the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland? Quite a few. Since the site went live in December, it has gotten more than 5,000 hits a month. It even scored a mention on the Web site of the Society for Creative Anachronism. --Jennifer Howard
|
Paul Ferguson
Member
| Joined: | Fri Feb 15th, 2008 |
| Location: | |
| Posts: | 1538 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
|
Posted: Wed Feb 11th, 2009 04:14 pm |
|
Link is:
http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/
(without the comma  )
A Raymundus Lullus [sic] manuscript is mentioned.Last edited on Wed Feb 11th, 2009 04:18 pm by Paul Ferguson
|
Leigh Penman
Member
| Joined: | Wed Aug 27th, 2008 |
| Location: | |
| Posts: | 39 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
|
Posted: Thu Feb 12th, 2009 12:32 am |
|
Great find!
Now if only something existed that pointed to a (relatively complete) listing of electronic editions of printed books!
It seems remarkable to me that it is easier to locate a hard copy of a particular 17th C. printed text, than to find a digital one!
|
Alan Pritchard
Guest
| Joined: | |
| Location: | |
| Posts: | |
| Status: |
Offline
|
|
Posted: Tue Mar 24th, 2009 04:59 pm |
|
| That would be a MAJOR task and a very fast moving target. I have immense difficulty trying to keep up with what is available. There are major repositories such as Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Open-Access Text Archive; then there are all the major general specialist sites such as Adam's, Rex Research, Sacred Text Archive; smaller and specialist sites (Rosicrucians etc) that put material up; universities providing digital facsimiles of texts; universities providing open access repositories of papers and theses.
|
Current time is 09:45 am | |
|
|
|
