Manuscripta

A Digital Catalogue of Manuscripts in Sweden

Dr Patrik Granholm, National Library of Sweden

IFLA RBSC conference Libraries in the sky

National Library of Norway, Oslo, 12 April 2018

http://bit.ly/ManuscriptaOslo

https://www.manuscripta.se

About

• A digital catalogue of medieval and early modern manuscripts preserved in Swedish libraries

• Maintained by the National Library of Sweden

• TEI is used for the manuscript descriptions
• IIIF for the digitised manuscripts
• Current status
  • 130 Greek and 40 medieval Old Swedish manuscripts
  • 50 000 digitised manuscript pages
  • 2 500 authority files for persons, organisations, places and bibliographical records

Background

• Development started in a project to catalogue and digitise Greek manuscripts in Sweden (2012–2016)
  • Created as an ad hoc solution for publishing TEI encoded descriptions
  • Customised encoding schema of TEI for detailed descriptions
• Development has continued in a project to catalogue medieval Old Swedish manuscripts (2016–2019)

TEI for Manuscript Descriptions

• TEI is suited for detailed cataloguing of manuscripts
• The hierarchical structure of TEI corresponds to the four parts used in cataloguing:
  • Description of contents
  • Codicological description
  • Provenance
  • Bibliography
• TEI supports descriptions of codicological units
• Descriptions can be linked to images and authority files
• TEI tagging enables advanced search queries
• TEI can easily be converted to other formats

Digitisation and Image Processing

• Mostly done using high resolution cameras (10–60 MP)
• Master images in uncompressed TIFF (up to 160 MB)
• Web images in compressed, pyramid TIFF (ca 10 MB)
• Zoom and pan functionality (tiled image pyramid)

Infrastructure

• Built using open source software
  • eXist-db, an XML database which offers advanced indexing and search functionality, and functions for converting TEI to HTML and PDF
  • Images served with the IIPImage Server
  • Diva.js and Mirador for displaying the digitised manuscripts
  • React.js for the web-based editor of the TEI files
• Source code and TEI files available on GitHub
• Images available free of restriction (CC0 Public Domain)

Demo of the Catalogue

Demo of the Mirador Viewer

Demo of the Editor

Future Plans

• Infrastructure
  • Controlled vocabulary for terms
  • Authority files for works
  • Linked Open Data (Microdata, RDF)
• Content
  • Ca 250 medieval Old Swedish manuscripts
  • A selection of digitised medieval and early modern manuscripts at the National Library
  • Ca 70 Icelandic manuscripts at the National Library
  • Ca 70 manuscripts from the Laurentius collection at Lund University Library
  • Database of illuminated medieval manuscripts in Sweden
  • Printed catalogues (OCR, data extraction)

Acknowledgments

http://bit.ly/ManuscriptaOslo

patrik.granholm@kb.se