Fragmentarium

It was supported initially by representatives of 12 institutions, its goal being to study the field of manuscript fragment research and look at worldwide cataloguing standards.

Fragmentarium was officially launched on 1 September 2017, by the Medieval Institute of the University of Fribourg at Abbey Library of St. Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

[5] Some fragments have been analysed using the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) to identify pigments, creating a unique "fingerprint" to enable it to be matched to corresponding fragments elsewhere in the world and potentially track their journey with “the potential to learn more about trade routes, historic mining sites, and the regional use of pigments and ingredients”.

[6] Other fragments have been identified as "recycled" into covers or bindings for later documents, a practice which was prevalent in the 15th to 17th century.

[8] In more recent times, in the 1950s and 1960s medieval manuscripts were frequently deliberately divided in order to attract a higher return on resale values and have subsequently become lost to researchers: Fragmentarium hopes to reunite them.