Metadata Phase
Metadata is data about other data; in our case, descriptive information about manuscripts. The key goal of the metadata phase is to make formal catalogue records of all our manuscripts available online.
There are four modern descriptive catalogues relating to manuscripts at St John’s library: Ralph Hanna’s catalogue of the western medieval manuscripts (2002), Emilie Savage-Smith’s catalogue of the Oriental manuscripts (2005), Mark Sosower’s catalogue of the Greek manuscripts (2007), and Stuart Tiley’s unpublished catalogue of the western post-medieval manuscripts (2018). Before the digitization project, the first three catalogues were only available in print, and Tiley’s catalogue was not publicly available.
Where is the western medieval metadata going?
Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries
https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
We are adding the entries in Hanna’s catalogue of the western medieval manuscripts (2002) to Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries (MMOL), a conversion process that is over 80% complete.
This online database is managed by the Bodleian Libraries and includes records for the Bodleian’s western medieval manuscripts and those of several Oxford Colleges.
The conversion process involves encoding Hanna’s records according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, also known as TEI. TEI is an application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML), and allows for texts to be encoded in a machine-readable format.
Not only is the information from Hanna’s catalogue gradually becoming available at the click of a button, but users can interact with this information in useful and convenient ways. For example, researchers can click links in catalogue entries to find other medieval manuscripts across various Oxford libraries that contain the same texts, or were previously owned by the same person or organisation.
Inspired by the front cover of Evan Davis et al 2018.
Where is the western post-1500 metadata going?
ArchivesHub
https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/
We are adding the entries from Tiley’s unpublished catalogue of western post-medieval manuscripts to ArchivesHub. These will join the existing records on our personal papers, such as the Robert Graves collection.
The addition of Tiley’s entries to ArchivesHub will offer the first publicly available catalogue of the western post-medieval manuscripts since Henry Coxe’s summary manuscript catalogue for Oxford colleges from 1852.
Like Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries, ArchivesHub allows users to make connections between catalogue entries, for example by tracing common owners.
Further Plans
The catalogue entries relating to the Greek manuscript collection will go on ArchivesHub. There are ongoing discussions about the best place to host the catalogue entries relating to the Oriental manuscript collection.
Sian Witherden