Imaging Shortlist
People often ask why we can’t digitize everything. Unfortunately, due to the labour and time that would take, that is not currently possible. As we have over four hundred manuscripts and more than twenty thousand early printed books in our care, imaging the entire collection would take a prohibitively long time. Assuming no breaks, photographing all of our special collections would likely take over three hundred years!
Therefore, at the outset of the Digitization Project, we needed to answer an important question: What items should we prioritize? We felt that the shortlist should be broadly representative of the relative sizes of our four manuscripts categories, for example, approximately half of the items on the shortlist and in our collection are from the Western medieval period.
Though the shortlist is comprised mostly of manuscripts, we are taking this opportunity to digitize some significant items from our collection beyond that, such as a hand-coloured second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, printed by William Caxton in 1483, a 1540 copy of Peter Apian’s Astronomicum caesareum, and a 1603 hand-coloured Ortelius atlas.
We wanted to put together a list that represented not only a range of items across our collections, but also the diversity of material within those collections, in terms of date, country of origin, language, genre, and cultural context. The result is a synthesised shortlist of items we feel best represent our varied special collections.
Below is a pie chart showing the distribution of the shortlist, and an inexhaustive overview of the selection criteria.
How was the imaging shortlist put together?
Here are six of the shortlisting criteria that we considered (not mutually exclusive):
Significant Textual Witnesses
E.g. MS 211 (17th c.). Proverbs of Solomon. Source for the 1646 edition (folios 1v-2r shown here). For further examples, see case 1.
Notable Provenance
E.g. MS 68 (15th c.). Once owned by George Bate, physician to King Charles II (folio 1r shown here). For further examples, see case 2.
Visual Appeal
E.g. MS 370 (18th c.) Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī (folio 1b shown here). For further examples, see case 3.
Vernacular Literature
E.g. MS 57 (15th c.). Includes a copy of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (folio 224r shown here).
Cultural or Historical Value
E.g. 279 (18th/19th c.). Jane and George Austen, Letters. (letter 4 shown here, addressed to Jane’s niece Anna).
Significance for College History
E.g. MS 52 (17th c.). Contains an account of theatrical celebrations at the college in 1607-8 (folio 3r shown here).
Sophie Bacchus-Waterman and Sian Witherden