17-04-2020, 09:28 PM
The Vatican library team are working on their digitisation project at an astonishing rate - they have so much stuff so it's going to take them at least another decade, but for a library that seems to exist outside of time and space, their digitisation efforts put most other places to shame.
I think that a related problem is that many library websites have terrible search interfaces and manuscript browsers so it can be really hard to quickly find a manuscript and study it, but the budget for developing these tools, or even converting pre-existing photo assets into a format and hierarchy that can be used by one of the new interfaces takes a lot of time and money. I have so many complaints about so many libraries and their terrible manuscript interfaces, but since I would like to visit these places in the future, I will have to be silent*.
Would it be useful to maintain a thread of manuscripts forum-members are interested in that have not yet been digitised? Then as stuff comes online we can update the thread.
*Please please please don't let the Wellcome Library develop another manuscript catalogue/image browser/search tool ever again under any circumstances. They appear to have 5? Or 6? They are not linked. They all have different info. They do not use the same shelf-mark formats. Some images only exist in one of the 5 (6?) systems. There is barely any metadata or item info available in their main image repository so good luck identifying anything when you find an image that you're interested in. Please could they spend their enormous amounts of money on fixing what they currently have rather than developing another new tool, and abandoning it 18 months later. Please.
I think that a related problem is that many library websites have terrible search interfaces and manuscript browsers so it can be really hard to quickly find a manuscript and study it, but the budget for developing these tools, or even converting pre-existing photo assets into a format and hierarchy that can be used by one of the new interfaces takes a lot of time and money. I have so many complaints about so many libraries and their terrible manuscript interfaces, but since I would like to visit these places in the future, I will have to be silent*.
Would it be useful to maintain a thread of manuscripts forum-members are interested in that have not yet been digitised? Then as stuff comes online we can update the thread.
*Please please please don't let the Wellcome Library develop another manuscript catalogue/image browser/search tool ever again under any circumstances. They appear to have 5? Or 6? They are not linked. They all have different info. They do not use the same shelf-mark formats. Some images only exist in one of the 5 (6?) systems. There is barely any metadata or item info available in their main image repository so good luck identifying anything when you find an image that you're interested in. Please could they spend their enormous amounts of money on fixing what they currently have rather than developing another new tool, and abandoning it 18 months later. Please.