Top 10 - Manuscripts, Archives or Documents to Digitize

[arca_libraria]

This... I fully understand that this is costly and harder than it looks, and I really appreciate all those places putting their manuscripts out there.

But it is a missed opportunity that there is not more uniformity in these manuscript viewers. For example, if you're looking for a specific image, you really need thumbnail views. I cannot understand why the BL doesn't have this function, for example. In my opinion, BNF for example does a much better job.

If there was a payed service that streamlines all these viewers, I would subscribe to it. I would also imagine that for institutions it could be more efficient to share their knowledge and cooperate instead of all developing and implementing their own tools.

I agree, the BNF manuscript catalogue and image viewer is excellent. The Vatican, Bodleian and St Gallen all have really good manuscript digitisations too if you ignore the giant watermarks on the Vatican images. The National Library of Russia is really good too from the little I've seen of it. I can't read Cyrillic well enough to fix my mistakes, so if I get lost it can be almost impossible to fix my search results and find what I'm looking for.

The BL is absolutely dreadful. They have three different text catalogues and two different image browers/digitisation phases. Their image browser doesn't have a thumbnail view, but it's one of the quickest out there for turning pages and zooming in. The BL search function has two modes of operation: it will either return 9000 items of which 3 are relevant and they're on pages 4, 16, and 92 of the results, or it will pretend it has never heard of books as either a concept or a physical object.

I was surprised by how old-fashioned the KBR manuscript viewer is, but it fits in with their earlier digitisations. On the KBR website there is no thumbnail view for a lot of the manuscripts, right-click > open in new tab is completely broken, the default manuscript viewer is tiny unless you let it expand to full screen, there is no catalogue/metadata easily available, no image rotation and it's so slow.

A lot of people are trying to make the streamlined-manuscript-viewer happen, but it's a very long way from success. There's a framework known as the IIIF (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and a lot of libraries have committed to making their digitisations match the IIIF-standard over the next 10 years. Sometimes existing digital images can be quickly updated to meet the IIIF standard, but unfortunately it is usually a very slow and laborious process that cannot be fully automated. A lot of newer digital images are IIIF-compliant and can be viewed in something like Mirador for even further analysis, but it doesn't solve the problem of the images on the terrible websites being stuck there with no way to get them out or improve them.