Electronic Catalogue of
Medieval & Renaissance
Manuscripts Project

Project Description

The catalogue is organised by collection and shelfmark with each collection preceded by introductory materials, including details of existing printed catalogues, and links to scanned page images with introductions and collection-level descriptions from the Quarto and Summary Catalogues. Each catalogue entry provides information about a single shelfmark. The entries are potentially expandable 'cells' which will initially include basic information about a manuscript, a link to scanned page images from the Quarto and Summary Catalogues, a consultation image of a page from the manuscript and a bibliography. The following sample entry can serve as an illustration.

Catalogue entries

The catalogue entries have six to ten fields with basic information about each manuscript including: shelfmark, Summary Catalogue number, summary of contents, date, language, material, origin, provenance and illumination. This information is principally drawn from:

• The Summary and Quarto catalogues;
• O. Pächt and J.J.G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1966-73), and B. C. Barker-Benfield, Illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Concordance of Bodleian shelf-marks for vols. 1-3 and Addenda (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1974);
• Irmgard Hutter, Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturenhandschriften I: Oxford, Bodleian Library, 3 vols. in 4 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1977-1982).

The electronic catalogue records are encoded in XML following the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Document Type Definition.

Printed catalogue page images

The electronic catalogue records will be linked to grey-scale images of pages of the Summary and Quarto Catalogues. The Catalogues have been digitized by the Bodleian Library Imaging Services using a bi-tonal Zeutschel book-scanner that produced TIFF images with a resolution of 600 dpi. The following format has been adopted for web delivery:

• format: GIF
• height: 900
• colour selection method: adaptive
• number of colours: 16
• dither (diffusion): 25
• websnap: 80

We believe that these settings allow reasonable compromise between legibility and file sizes of the resulting images.

Bibliography

The catalogue includes bibliography of published and unpublished works about each manuscript. The bibliography has been maintained by the Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, and previously existed in two forms: index cards with references to books, journal articles, offprints and unpublished materials held by the department; and electronic files with bibliography for the last 10 years. The references from index cards are being keyed into an Endnote bibliographic database, exported in EAD XML and added to the catalogue records. The electronic bibliography is being converted to EAD XML and added to the catalogue records.

Manuscript page images

As far as possible the catalogue entries will have links to colour consultation images of manuscript pages to supplement the descriptions and give readers an initial idea of the appearance of the manuscript. These images will be derived from the SCWMSS department's existing slide collection. Some catalogue entries will have links to further images at the Browse Images of Medieval Manuscripts web site or full digital facsimiles published by the Early Manuscripts at Oxford project.

Last revised 24 July 2002 by LwM
© Bodleian Library