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The End of an Era: Saying Goodbye to the DMMapp after 12+ Years

It’s hard to say goodbye, but it’s time to pass the torch.

To our wonderful community of medievalists, codicologists, and book lovers,

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the sunsetting of the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts app (DMMapp) on 22/11/2026.

For the past 12 years, this project has been a labor of love—a way for us to give back to a field we care deeply about and to help connect researchers with the resources they need.

Why now?

This was not an easy decision, but it is a necessary one. This has always been a passion project maintained in our spare time. Over the years, life has evolved, and we simply no longer have the time required to give the DMMapp the attention and maintenance it deserves.

Additionally, the practical reality of keeping a web application running has caught up with us. For the past three years, the costs of hosting and maintaining the infrastructure have exceeded the generous donations we receive. While we have happily covered these gaps for a long time, it is no longer sustainable for us to continue.

A Special Thanks to our Patrons

We want to take a moment to extend a heartfelt thank you to the incredible people who supported us on Patreon. Whether you joined us as a Sexy Codicologist, a Scribe, or a Master Scribe, your contributions went directly into keeping the servers running and the code updated for as long as possible.

You didn’t just help pay for hosting; you validated our work and kept us motivated. To those who have been with us for months or even years—thank you for believing in this project. You helped us keep the lights on for the entire community.

What’s Next? Our Roadmap for the Sunset Phase

To ensure the 12 years of data we’ve collected remains a value-add for the community, we are following a strict transition plan:

  • Donations & Patreon: We are stopping all donation collection immediately. Our Patreon tiers will be deactivated, and the related pages will be shut down shortly.
  • Application Updates: We will implement visible notices across the platform to ensure every visitor knows exactly when the DMMapp website will no longer be accessible.
  • Preparing for the "Fork": Our focus has shifted to making the codebase 100% "fork-ready." We are refining the application so that any individual or institution with the passion to do so can re-launch it with minimal friction. You can follow our final progress on GitHub.
  • Documentation Overhaul: We are performing an extensive rewrite of our documentation. This "Handover Manual" will clarify installation and maintenance requirements for future maintainers.
  • Final "Golden" Dataset Export: After a final data cleanup, we will provide a downloadable snapshot of our entire library of links, ensuring the curated metadata remains available even if the application is not live.
  • GitHub Archival: Once the spin-down is complete, we will set the GitHub repository to "Archived" status, preserving it as a read-only historical resource.
  • Retrospective: We will write a short retrospective about how the project went: what worked and what did not work. The goal of this is to help others that might want to run a similar project.
  • Wayback Machine Preservation: We will coordinate with the Internet Archive to ensure a final, comprehensive crawl of the site is performed for digital preservation.

A Legacy that Lives On

While the DMMapp application and blogs are spinning down, the heart of the project—its data and its code—is not going anywhere. When we built the DMMapp, we did so with maintainability and openness in mind.

We believe in the power of open access. Therefore, all our code and the entire dataset of digitized libraries will be available to anyone who wants to carry the project forward.

We are incredibly proud of what we achieved together over the last 12+ years. The DMMapp may be closing its doors, but the digital medievalist community is stronger than ever.

With gratitude,

Giulio & Marjolein The DMMapp Team