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documents <strong>in</strong> the sphere of historic book resources (manuscripts, <strong>in</strong>cunabula, early pr<strong>in</strong>ted books,
maps, charters and other types of documents).” 390 Manuscriptorium provides access to more than 5
million digital images from dozens of European as well as several Asian libraries and museums.
Extensive multil<strong>in</strong>gual access is provided to this collection (<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g English, French, German, and
Spanish). In addition to multil<strong>in</strong>gual searches, a translation tool provided by Systran can be used to
translate manuscript descriptions from one language to another. This rich multil<strong>in</strong>gual environment
<strong>in</strong>cludes both modern and ancient languages, and this has had led to complicated transcription issues
s<strong>in</strong>ce the collection <strong>in</strong>cludes Old Slavonic, Greek, Arabic, Persian, and various Indian languages.
The Manuscriptorium collection can be searched by document identification or document orig<strong>in</strong>, and
provides both easy and advanced search <strong>in</strong>terfaces. The former allows a user to search for documents
by location, keyword, time frame, responsible person or associated name, or, for those documents with
a digital facsimile, full-text transcription, edition, or transliteration. The advanced search offers
multiple keyword entry <strong>in</strong> the fields (shelf-mark, text anywhere, country, settlement, and library). A
user search br<strong>in</strong>gs up a list of relevant manuscripts, and each manuscript description <strong>in</strong>cludes full
bibliographic <strong>in</strong>formation, a physical description, and a l<strong>in</strong>k to a full digital facsimile (when available).
Open<strong>in</strong>g a digital facsimile launches a separate image viewer for exam<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the images of the
facsimile that are available.
Knoll et al. (2009) have provided some further explanation of the history, technical design, and goals
of the Manuscriptorium project. It began as the Czech Manuscriptorium Digital Library <strong>in</strong> 2002 and
through the ENRICH project 391 was expanded to provide seamless access to data about and digital
images of manuscripts from numerous European <strong>in</strong>stitutions. Manuscriptorium supports harvest<strong>in</strong>g via
OAI for exist<strong>in</strong>g digital collections of manuscripts and has also created tools to allow participat<strong>in</strong>g
organizations that simply wish to create their digital library as part of the larger Manuscriptorium to
create compliant data. The development of Manuscriptorium has <strong>in</strong>volved the creation of technical and
legal agreements that have also evolved over time. The early standard used <strong>in</strong> manuscript description
was the MASTER DTD 392 and participat<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the project required that partners provide detailed
technical descriptions about their manuscript images as well as a “framework for mapp<strong>in</strong>g the
document structure with references to images.”
Under the auspices of the ENRICH program, the Manuscriptorium project realized that a new, more
robust DTD would be necessary. This was a complicated process as they sought to harvest data created
from two very different approaches to manuscript description—that of the library community (MARC)
and that of researchers and text encoders (TEI):
In the so-called catalogue or bibliographic segment, there are certa<strong>in</strong> description granularity
problems when convert<strong>in</strong>g metadata from MASTER (TEI P.4) to MARC, while vice versa is
not problematic. On the other hand, TEI offers much more flexibility and analytical depth even
<strong>in</strong> the description segment and, furthermore, be<strong>in</strong>g a part of a complex document format, it also
provides space for structural mapp<strong>in</strong>g (Knoll et al 2009).
S<strong>in</strong>ce two major goals of the ENRICH project were to support data <strong>in</strong>terchange and shar<strong>in</strong>g as well as
data storage, Oxford University Computer Services led the development of both a new, TEI P5-
390 http://beta.manuscriptorium.com/
391 The recently concluded ENRICH project (funded under the European Union eContent + progamme) provided fund<strong>in</strong>g to expand Manuscriptorium to
serve as a digital library platform “to create seamless access to distributed <strong>in</strong>formation about manuscripts and rare old pr<strong>in</strong>ted books.”
http://enrich.manuscriptorium.com/
392 http://digit.nkp.cz/MMSB/1.1/msnkaip.xsd