This is the Sources page, where you can explore resources that can help you find digital surrogates and metadata for manuscripts.
The Philadelphia region is home to a large number of libraries with truly outstanding special collections, most of whom are members of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). Fifteen of these libraries have catalogued and digitized 450 medieval Western European manuscripts with the generous support of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), via its Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative. All images have been released into the public domain. The BiblioPhilly website provides access to the medieval manuscripts of Philadelphia — books written entirely by hand, and often gloriously illuminated with sumptuous pictures.
The Digital Beehive is a web interface that serves as both a digital representation and host of digital tools for researching and working with Pastorius’s manuscript and its system of cross-referencing.The Digital Beehive lies at the nexus of manuscript studies and digital humanities. Not quite an aggregated database nor a digital edition, this project pushes our understanding of the digital humanities in new directions, as our datasets ultimately serve to replicate, reveal, and share a hyperlinked data system developed by a single author in the Early Modern period in manuscript form.
OPenn contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of cultural heritage material from the collections of its contributing institutions, along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata. All materials on OPenn are in the public domain or released under Creative Commons licenses as Free Cultural Works. Please see specific repository pages and documents for applicable license terms. The data on OPenn is intended for aggregators, digital humanists, and scholars who have been directed here to procure high-resolution images of manuscript pages. It is presented in a manner most likely to ensure its long-term digital preservation. Many of the images here are available via more user-friendly page-turning applications on institutional websites. See individual repository pages for details. This tutorial provides an introduction to the Penn Libraries’ website OPenn, as well as an introductory lesson on using the command line program wget with OPenn. Learn why OPenn was created, what materials are available on OPenn, how to navigate the site, and how to download images and metadata from OPenn using wget.
The SDBM aggregates observations of pre-modern manuscripts from historical and contemporary sources that document the sales and locations of these books from around the world. Entries in the SDBM assist researchers in locating and identifying particular manuscripts, establishing provenance, and collecting descriptive information about specific classes or types of manuscripts. Our user community includes scholars, librarians, booksellers, students, collectors, and others who care about manuscripts and want to contribute to our shared knowledge of their histories. This introductory webinar provides a basic introduction to the database. It includes an explanation of the SDBM’s development history and data model, followed by demonstrations of the user interface and search strategies. This webinar was recorded on May 19, 2020 with a live audience and includes their questions at the end.