A couple of days ago I received an email from Cambridge Trinity College. I was kindly asked if it was possible to update the link to their digitized medieval manuscripts on the DMMmaps. The email mentioned that they have "been hard at work updating and making it look prettier". Moved by curiosity, I went to give a look and updated the link.
One of our favourite institutions that shares digitized medieval manuscripts online is the J. Paul Getty Museum. The reasons are many, and we will explore them in this post. This is just a small fraction of all the objects available on the website. There are at least 107 digitized medieval manuscripts, and each one is stunning.
The "A Medieval Manuscript a Week" series promotes digitized medieval manuscripts that are made available under Creative Commons Licenses, Public Domain or Open Content.
There is something genuinely thrilling in discovering a digitized medieval manuscript! The DMMmaps Project is our small attempt to help everyone find these incredible books, by bringing together the libraries that make them available online.
Not all digitized libraries are created equal, and some are more interactive than others. Few let you listen to medieval music. One of the few is the Ville de Laon library.
The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (HAB) is a German library, located in the heart of the country, not too far from Hannover. Founded in 1572 it is now home to 900,000 books and 734 digitized manuscripts. There are 16 different collections to browse through, plus several manuscripts coming from other 10 institutions. Every collection has a brief description of its contents: how many manuscripts are in the collection, how many of these are medieval, in which languages there are written, how old they are (oldest and newest,) their provenance, and a list of the digitized manuscripts.
While testing the Standard map yesterday evening, I randomly clicked one of the pins to check if everything was working as intended. I ended up on the Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (MDZ) website and started giving a look around. As imaginable, after five minutes I was drooling for the quantity of amazing manuscripts that you can find on this website.
Well, yesterday it was a success! We launched the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps one hour ahead of schedule (it leaked through Twitter... eheh...), but we like to believe it was a lucky event, since what followed on Twitter was a feast of re-tweets and new followers. In just 48 hours, the website was visited around 3'000 times. We would like to thank all of you who have shared, liked, re-tweeted, re-tumbled, +1ed, etc. It really helped a lot and it certainly got the message out there. This blog is going to be about digitized special collections only. The Sexy Codicology Blog, instead, covers all the aspects of medieval manuscripts. As of today, there are 246 libraries and institutions on the DMMmaps. Same are very famous; others are a bit less traveled by but are, nonetheless, the keepers of fantastic treasures that are available online for everyone to be discovered.