Digital Scriptorium
As a new Council member, I’d like to highlight the Digital Scriptorium as an increasingly indispensable portal into North American repositories of medieval and early modern manuscripts. It has the potential to become a national union catalogue, with 15,000 records from 37 member institutions’ collections currently available and counting. Among the institutions represented are major collections, such as the New York Public Library and the Universities of Harvard, Pennsylvania, Texas and Yale, and smaller repositories like the Grolier Club.
The original Digital Scriptorium, established in 1997, was the brainchild of Prof. Charles Faulhaber and Dr. Consuelo W. Dutschke. It was managed as a joint project and hosted alternately by their respective institutions, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University, until 2022.
In recent years, the Digital Scriptorium underwent a major redevelopment led by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. It transformed the DS Catalog into a single platform, with a data repository and a knowledge base combined and powered by Linked Open Data. Built on Wikidata, one of the world’s largest free and open knowledge bases of structured data, the DS Catalog makes manuscripts included in it more easily findable and individual institutions’ metadata fully reusable, contributing to digital sustainability.
The DS Catalog can be explored through the user-friendly faceted and keyword search interface. Alternatively, a deeper, linked data research could be undertaken through Wikibase: a helpful introduction is provided by the DS Project and Data Manager L. P. Coladangelo in a list of basic SPARQL queries. It is easy to join the DS community and receive updates on newly added material: sign up here for the DS newsletter.
Enjoy!
Stella Panayotova, member of Council
