Documents in Archives

[ReneZ]

Although I think Mark is referring to documents not yet available online that would be directly related to the VM, whether research related or provenance, I think it will also be invaluable to have more medieval and other manuscripts available online for comparison to the VM. For example, so far I haven't run across any that have folios even remotely like the Rosettes but that doesn't mean such isn't out there to be found or found but not yet digitized. Time will tell.

That is precisely right.

I agree that finding such lost treasures would be wonderful but I think it is unlikely to happen. I can't imagine many people will bother to look unless you did something like The Vesuvius Challenge and it would take money to do that.



You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Searching in archives is serious work, and this is done all the time, by competent researchers. Voluntarily. Even eagerly.
One just does not hear about it a lot.
Don't ever expect to go to an archive and be the first to search any part of it. Or to be among the first 20.

From my limited personal experience, as a marginally competent novice, I can only advise that researching in an archive, even 'just' a library, in order to find a specific and desired item, is the wrong approach.

The first thing is that one should be prepared to spend a lot of time.
The second is that one should have a broad background knowledge of the materials.
This is because one has a good chance of finding interesting, yet 'unexpected' gems. These will not be recognised without this background knowledge.
Searching for a specific piece of evidence creates a bias that will hinder finding such gems.