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Ad Fontes

Ad Fontes is a web platform designed to train students and scholars for medieval archival work. Administered through the University of Zurich, the project requires the user to register for a free account that then allows him or her to take modules on the use of archives. Numerous modules exist, including ones on transcription, coinage, heraldry, chronology, dating, and maps. Transcription and script training focuses on several languages, including medieval Latin, German, and Scandinavian languages among others. Transcription modules include quizzes that allow a user to test their progress.

The platform is continuously updated, with new modules added every few months.

Alberti Magni e-corpus

The aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility: 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 60 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 19,000 pages in print or 8.6 million words.

ALIM (Archivio della latinità italiana del Medioevo)

Ongoing project to collect Latin texts written in Italy during the Middle Ages. The holdings are divided between literary (e.g. hagiography, philosophy, sermons, chronicles) and documentary (e.g. town statutes, papal bulls) works, and can be searched or browsed by period, location, author, genre, prose, or verse. Each item includes the edition from which the text was taken, and preserves original pagination.

Bibliotheca Latina: Latinitas Mediaevalis

A free digital library providing medieval Latin texts from the 7th to the 14th centuries in an alphabetical list (by author). It is part of the larger IntraText Library digital collection published by Èulogos SpA (http://www.eulogos.net), which includes, among other archives, Biblioteca Italiana and Biblioteca religiosa. Texts are harvested from other websites—not all academic–as well as print matter. Searchable across entire collection. Includes linked notes, concordances, lists, and statistics related to texts. Although BL texts are also searchable by author, title, or general period of origin, the site offers no editorial or contextual information. Published under Creative Commons.

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Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM)

The BVMM is a French-language resource that serves as a clearing house for images and data on medieval manuscripts held in institutions in Europe. Institutions range from municipal libraries and religious houses up to major research and university libraries across continental Europe. Images can sometimes be from microfilm, black and white, or in full color.

Boethius: De Consolatione Philosophiae

This synoptic edition of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae aims to provide to new readers with a text that is both accessible and enlightening: accessible in the sense that while the original Latin is provided, so is a modern English translation which may be read parallel to to the original. This will allow the casual learner of Latin to more easily appreciate the beauty of Boethius’ poetry, or simply enjoy the wide range of translations provided.

Cassiodorus

Resources on the life and work of Cassiodorus, including full text of James J. O’Donnell’s Cassiodorus (UC-Berkeley, 1979), as well as Cassiodorus’ De animaInstitutiones books 1 and 2, and Variae. Also included are the Instituta of Junillus, Quaestor at Constantinople and Cassiodorus’ contemporary, and Jordanes’ Getica, an abridged version of Cassiodorus’ lost Gothic History.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Chinese Text Project

The Chinese Text Project is an open-access digital library whose goal is to make available a wide variety of Chinese texts from ancient periods. Though the site focuses on ancient texts in particular, texts from the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties are well represented as well. Texts are generally taken from open-source documents published elsewhere on the internet, but there are also original transcriptions as well.

The CTP also brings together a variety of resources for the study of ancient Chinese texts, including dictionaries, bibliographies, and other resources. There is also an active discussion board where questions of transcription and translation are frequently asked. The site continues to be updated regularly.

Christine de Pizan

A collection of online resources about Christine de Pizan, including links to digitized manuscripts and incunabula, out-of-copyright modern editions of her work (in the original French as well as English translation), and scholarly societies, projects, and websites devoted to Christine.

Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium

The Christine de Pizan Digital Scriptorium is an ongoing project to make available digital surrogates of all the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s literary work. Currently, the project offers digital surrogates of 56 of the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s work, including all the manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Manuscripts are presented in a IIIF viewer.

Copyright to individual manuscripts and their images is retained by the institution that holds the material.

Collatex

CollateX is a software to

  1. read multiple (≥ 2) versions of a text, splitting each version into parts (tokens) to be compared,
  2. identify similarities of and differences between the versions (including moved/transposed segments) by aligning tokens, and
  3. output the alignment results in a variety of formats for further processing, for instance
  4. to support the production of a critical apparatusor the stemmatical analysis of a text’s genesis.

Dartmouth Dante Project

The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) is a searchable full-text online database that, in addition to incorporating the Petrocchi edition of Dante’s Commedia, collates commentaries on Dante’s poem from the earliest exegeses (in the 1320s), to those included in the most recent scholarly editions of Dante’s poem (up to Fosca, 2003-2015). Commentaries are included in the original language (Latin, English, or Italian) and are searchable by canticle, canto, verse line, word, or phrase. The DDP is a very useful resource for Dante scholars and a valuable portal into the commentary tradition, an important domain of critical scholarship on Dante.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Decameron Web

Decameron Web offers an integrated digital platform for the study of Boccaccio’s major work, The Decameron. Users are able to navigate material pertaining to the historical, literary, and cultural contexts of the Decameron’s production and reception and to access a full text of the work in its original Italian and English translation. The site incorporates educational activities for teachers and interactive resources for students. The Decameron Web is the only digital resource currently available for the study of Boccaccio’s Decameron and is a very valuable tool for students, scholars, and instructors alike.

* National History Day Selected Resource *

Digital Bodleian

The Bodleian Libraries’ collections are extraordinary and significant—both from a scholarly point of view and as material that has an historic and aesthetic richness that holds value for non-academic users. Each year the Libraries serve more than 65,000 readers, over 40% of them from beyond the University, while its critically-acclaimed exhibitions attract almost 100,000 visitors annually. In an effort to make portions of our collections open to a wide variety of users from around the world for learning, teaching and research, the Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing library content for nearly twenty years. The result is over 650,000 freely available digital objects and almost another 1 million images awaiting release.

Like many academic libraries, though, our freely available digital collections have been placed online in project-driven websites, with content stored in discrete ‘silos’, each with their own metadata format, different user interfaces, and no common search interface enabling users to discover content or navigate across collections. Some of our collections are linked at portal pages, but each collection remains, with a few exceptions, isolated and difficult to search. In addition, only a few collections offer a machine-readable interface, or any way to link their data with similar data in other Bodleian collections, or with collections at other institutions.

Digital.Bodleian aims to solve these problems by:

  • Bringing together our discrete collections under a single user interface which supports fast user-friendly viewing of high resolution images.
  • Standardizing the metadata for each collection to facilitate faceted browsing and searching across collections.
  • Converting all of our images in a variety of formats to JPEG2000 and migrating them to a robust scalable storage infrastructure.
  • Allowing users to tag and annotate images and group together content into their own virtual collections which can be shared with other users.
  • Allowing users to export metadata and images.

All of these tasks have been carried out using standards-compliant file formats and methods and with a view to future expansion, scalability and robustness.