The Digital Scriptorium and Master: Two Major Initiatives in Online Manuscript Cataloging: A report from the 2001 International Congress on Medieval Studies

Information Technology and Hispanic Studies THE DIGITAL SCRIPTORIUM AND MASTER: TWO MAJOR INITIATIVES IN ONLINE MANUSCRIPT CATALOGING A report from the 2001 International Congress on Medieval Studies Mark Johnston Newberry Library The Digital Scriptorium and MASTER are two ofthe latest projects in online manuscript cataloging that promise to extend tremendously the scholarly resources available to medievalists via the Internet. At the 2001 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, representatives ofeach project reported on their efforts in Session 147, "Work of the MASTER Project: Encoding Manuscript Descriptions, Devising an Online Prototype Manuscript Union Catalog". Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia University) described the latest achievements of the Digital Scriptorium; Matthew Driscoll (Arnamagnaean Institute, Copenhagen) and Peter Robinson (De Montfort University) discussed the progress of MASTER (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records). Like the earlier and still ongoing Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts project (EAMMS, http://www.hmml.org/ eamms), both of these new projects developed from the work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and seek to create online union catalogs for manuscripts. Both employ the more powerful capabilities for structuring data now offered by Extensible Markup Language (XML). Like the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used to create web pages, XML is a descendant of the venerable Standard Generalized La corónica 29.2 (Spring, 2001): 249-56 250MarkjohnstonLa corónica 29.2,2001 Markup Language (SGML). The Digital Scriptorium began in 1996 as a joint project of Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley. MASTER is likewise a collaborative effort by six institutions -The Centre for Technology and the Arts of De Montfort University, Royal Library of the Netherlands, L'Institut de recherche et d'histoire de textes, The Arnamagnaean Institute, the Humanities Computing Unit ofOxford University, and the National Library ofthe Czech Republic- initiated in 1999 with funding from the European Union. The projects enjoy strong cooperation with one another, thanks in part to their common debt to the TEI, although their objectives and methods are somewhat different. The Digital Scriptorium (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium) presents itself as a "Prototype Visual Union Catalog of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts", designed chiefly to serve the needs of "paleographers , codicologists, art historians, textual scholars, and other researchers" in the history of the book. In her remarks, Dutschke stressed how images provider a fuller "description" that effectively serves to "verify" the verbal record regarding a book. This focus on the manuscript as material object makes the catalog's digital images its primary resource. The images strive to record "the work of every scribe, every script, every artist, every level of the decorative hierarchy , every ownership note, even flyleaves and binding" of interest in a manuscript. The actual number of images displayed for each manuscript ranges from one to eighty-five, with an average of six, and some 8500 images are now available online in a provisional database with a simple search engine. The Digital Scriptorium search engine permits querying of data from any one of three areas, although not of information from combinations of these areas: 1) the complete manuscript's Shelfmark, Binding , and Provenance; 2) each separate part's Country, Cardinal Point, Region, City, Document, Dated, Date, Layout, Script, Scribe, Music, Support, Watermark, Representational Decoration, Other Decoration, and Artist; and 3) each individual text's Author, Other Associated Name, Title, Supplied Title, Docket, Incipit, Language and captions. Accompanying the search on text data are lists of all authors and of all titles (but not both together) found in the database. Literary historians seeking to know which texts by which authors are in a manuscript may find this apparatus somewhat frustrating to use. For example, the list of authors includes "Raymond Lull" (sic). A search of text data by author using the terms "lui" or "lull" returns main entries for three manuscripts , including Union Theological Seminary, Burke Library MS 14: The Digital Scriptorium and Master251 MANUSCRIPT INFORMATION Shelfmark: UTS MS 14 Held at: The Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York Composite: Yes Number of Folios: ff. 2 1 1 Binding: Original wooden boards and stamped calf; back pastedown : a double parchment leaf of an early printed ediTION of Alexander de Villa Dei, Doctrinale (32 lines to a page). Provenance: Leander...