Digitization of Medieval Manuscripts

The Gotha Research Library of the University of Erfurt is participating in the digitization of the manuscript heritage in German libraries. It has digitized 247 of its 525 significant medieval manuscripts and has made them available for research. A total of 83,084 digital images were produced. From the library’s total collection, those manuscripts were digitized which have been in high demand by researchers in recent decades and whose in-depth indexing has thus been promoted by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and those which have been catalogued according to the standardized brief indexing process of the inventory list. The corpus consists of (1) Latin medieval paper manuscripts, (2) medieval paper and parchment manuscripts in German, (3) a medieval manuscript, belonging to the Reformation collection, and (4) the Maugérard manuscripts. According to the guidelines of the DFG and the master plan for digitizing medieval manuscripts in German libraries, the digitizations were annotated with meta- and structural data, and presented in the Digital Historical Library of Erfurt/Gotha. Moreover, the results will also be uploaded to the German Digital Library, the Europeana, as well as in Manuscripta Mediaevalia, or in the currently emerging manuscript portal. All project results are freely and permanently available online, in Open Access, and are preserved for the long term. With this project, the Research Library continues the research-oriented digitisation of its most significant and unique collections.