Digital Scriptorium

Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-profit, tax-exempt consortium of American libraries with collections of medieval and early modern manuscripts, that is, handwritten books made in the traditions of the world's scribal cultures.

The original goal was to digitize and make an online database available on the World Wide Web catalog records and selected images from the two universities' medieval European and early Renaissance manuscript collections.

[8][9][10] Originally using Microsoft Access to serve as a cross-institutional data collection tool, the DS database used SGML and later XML to aggregate and query the combined information.

[11][12] However, weaknesses relating to both the technical platform and the workflows for data creation and management were by this time beginning to threaten the sustainability of Digital Scriptorium.

[20] DS 2.0 solved earlier workflow challenges by transforming data created and maintained by member institutions' structured metadata into LOD and enriches it with semantic connections to external authorities and Wikidata.

DS Catalog entries also link out to member institution's websites and digital repositories, where users can discover more detailed information about and often images of the manuscripts held in their respective home collections.

DS Catalog entries also link out to member institution's websites and digital repositories, where users can discover more detailed information about the manuscripts held in their respective home collections.

Special emphasis has been placed on touchstone materials such as manuscripts signed and dated by scribes, thus beginning the American contribution to the goal established in 1953 by the Comité international de paléographie latine (International Committee of Latin Paleography): to document the relatively small number of codices of certain origin that will serve stylistically to localize and date the vast quantities of unsigned manuscripts[RL1] .

Because the DS consortium consists of academic, public, and rare book libraries and museums, it encourages a broad audience that benefits from a reciprocally beneficial body of knowledge.

Leaf from a Gradual, c, 1450–1475, Italy; New York, Columbia University, Plimpton MS 040A
Glossed Psalter, Paris, c. 1140–60; Berkeley, CA, U.C. Berkeley Bancroft Library, MS UCB 147, fol. 46v-47r.
Pontifical, Italy, c. 1385-1499; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Typ 0001, fol. 99r
De Civitate Dei, France, c. 1300–1399; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Typ 0228, fol. 1v
Military use of explosives, Germany, 1584; Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS Codex 0109, fol. 67v-68r