manuscripta.se

Introduction

• Digital catalogue of medieval and early modern manuscripts in Sweden

• Developed and maintained by the National Library of Sweden

• TEI is used for the manuscript descriptions
• IIIF for the digitised manuscripts
• Current status
  • 385 manuscripts (236 digitised)
  • ca 77 000 images
  • ca 10 000 authority files for persons, organisations, places, works, and bibliographical records
• Contains mainly Greek and Old Swedish manuscripts, but other manuscripts are added on a regular basis
• The long-term aim is to include all medieval and early modern manuscripts in Sweden

Manuscript Descriptions

• Encoded in TEI using customised schemas and cataloguing guidelines
• TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) develops and maintains a standard and a set of guidelines for the representation of texts in digital form
• TEI has become the standard metadata format for descriptions of medieval manuscripts
• TEI is well suited for this since the structure of format is structured according to the four parts used in detailed scholarly descriptions:
  • Description of contents
  • Codicological description
  • Provenance
  • Bibliography
• TEI supports descriptions of codicological units
• TEI markup enables advanced search queries, and easy conversion between metadata formats

Manuscript Digitisations

• The digitised manuscripts are displayed using IIIF
• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) develops and maintains a set of APIs for delivering and sharing images on the web

• IIIF has had a huge impact in the cultural sector and is widely used by libraries and museums worldwide

• Key benefits of IIIF

  • Advanced, interactive functionalities like manipulation of size, scale, region of interest, rotation of images etc.

  • Possibility to link to a specific image, or even a section of an image, with a stable URI

  • Possibility to retrieve images from other image servers that support IIIF

Infrastructure

• Built entirely using open-source software
  • eXist-db, an XML database with indexing and search functionality, and functions for converting TEI to HTML
  • Images served with IIIF using IIPImage Server, and the Mirador image viewer
  • Editing interface built with React.js
• Source code and TEI files available on GitHub
• Images available free of restriction (CC0 Public Domain)

Demo

Acknowledgments

manuscripta.se

patrikgranholm.com

patrik.granholm@kb.se