Manuscripts Online is Live!

Manuscripts Online has now been officially launched. We hope you’ll like it!

We have a few resources still to be processed and added to the search engine, but the site is essentially complete. Key features include

• Sophisticated custom search which enables you to combine Keyword, Place, Person and Date searches; and/or restrict your search to specific Resources, Categories, Formats and Access Types
• Resource Descriptions provide outline information about each of the included resources, what they cover, whether they’re free to access, and so on
• User Registration, enabling users to comment on resources and search results, pin items to locations on a map, and access a personal Workspace

About the Project

Website designs – sneak preview

Tags

designs, graphics

These are the latest versions of the five main designs for the MSSO website. Please feel free to leave feedback (but remember, this is purely for the visual design – text is (mostly) there for display purposes only).

Resource information page

• Homepage (March 2012)
• Search page (March 2012)
• Search results page (March 2012)
• Resources listing page (March 2012)
• Resource information page (March 2012)

First designs and focus group

The report from our focus group on 29 February is now available at the Documentation page.

I’ve also posted the three test homepage designs used for the focus group there – if you’d like to leave additional feedback (in comments below), that would be most welcome. This will be on the agenda at our project/Advisory Group meeting on Friday!

Help with Language Resources

Can you help us? We’re looking for digital language resources for Latin (especially Medieval Latin), Anglo-Norman French, and Old and Middle English.

We already have, or hope to have shortly, the following:

• Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary (Perseus)
• Du Cange, Latin Glossary (thanks to Andrew Dunning)
• Digital Anglo-Norman Dictionary
• Middle English Dictionary (U. Michigan)
• We’re also aware of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, but not sure how far advanced that project is.

We’re not just looking for ‘proper’ dictionaries; basically, we really need word lists, especially common spelling variations.

To be usable, resources must be in a structured text format and free to use. Ideally, we’re looking for a database or tagged XML, but as long as there’s some sort of regular structure (eg an HTML table or list) it may be useful. They don’t necessarily have to be available online.

But we can’t use PDFs or scanned images.

We will be very happy to obtain any necessary permission from resource owners and give them credit when the project launches.

If you have any ideas, please leave a suggestion in comments below or tweet @MedMSSO, with URL or contact information where possible. (Comments are likely to be moderated, but they will appear eventually and will be noted.)

All help will be gratefully received!

Manuscripts Online: the resources

The full list of the resources we plan to include in the first launch of Manuscripts Online in January 2013:

• Middle English Dictionary – the authoritative reference work for Middle English from 1100-1500; over 15,000 entries with citations.
• Manuscripts of the West Midlands – catalogue of vernacular manuscript books of the English West Midlands, c. 1300-1475; detailed descriptions of more than 150 manuscripts
• Production and Use of English Manuscripts: 1060 to 1220 – catalogue of manuscripts, especially those containing literary materials, written principally in English from c. 1060 to 1220
• Imagining History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography – a database of descriptions of the Middle English Prose Brut
• Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 1350-1550 – a new account of English vernacular lives of Christ derived from the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi.
• Middle English Grammar Project – the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C); Middle English texts transcribed from manuscript or facsimile reproduction
• Late Medieval English Scribes – catalogue of all scribal hands in the manuscripts of the English writings of five major Middle English authors
• The Norman Blake Editions of the Canterbury Tales – a series of online editions which present full diplomatic transcriptions of seven manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
• The Auchinleck Manuscript – digital edition of the Auchinleck Manuscript (NLS Adv MS 19.2.1)
• Europa Inventa – descriptive catalogue of medieval manuscripts held within Australian institutions
• The Cause Papers of the Church Courts of the diocese of York – descriptive catalogue with accompanying images
• The Taxatio – detailed records of the assessment of English and Welsh ecclesiastical wealth undertaken in 1291-2
• British History Online – transcriptions and databases, ranging from administrative and ecclesiastical history to economic and intellectual history
• British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval & Renaissance – c.500,000 pages of searchable metadata with accompanying digital facsimile images
• Early English Books Online – metadata and digital facsimile images of 782 printed volumes between the year 1473 to 1500.
• EEBO Text Creation Partnership (subscription) – approx. 136 full-text transcriptions of the Early English Books Online volumes
• Parker on the Web – high resolution images and detailed cataloguing of 559 manuscripts
• The National Archives – Descriptive catalogues for all documents dating between 1000 and 1500 from collections such as the State Papers, records of the Admiralty, Chancery and Exchequer, the Court of the King’s Bench and Petitions and Seals
• Online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts – British Library’s descriptive catalogue of 2,000 illuminated manuscripts originating in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland
• Compendium of Middle English Prose and Verse – c. 150 full-text transcriptions of literary and administrative works
• TEAMS Middle English Texts – more than 400 annotated editions of key literary works for teaching and research

We will post fuller profiles of some of the resources over the coming months.

NB: some of these are subscriber-only resources. Everyone will be able to search their textual content on MSSO and see results with short snippets of text for context, but only users with subscription access will be able to view the actual resources.

Project Plan

As promised, we’ve posted the final version of the formal project plan for future reference. This is a technical document which may be of interest to groups considering similar digital history projects.

Project News

A few updates!

1. The minutes of our first meeting in November are available here, and our projected timetable for the project is here. Not the most exciting announcement we'll ever make, but we do intend to make as much of the documentation of the project accessible as possible (though sensitive information may sometimes be redacted for public versions). The full project plan should be uploaded early in the New Year, once it's been approved by JISC.

2. Many thanks to everyone who signed up to help us with user testing next year! You should by now have been signed up to the mailing list – if you haven't received a notification please feel free to leave a comment. If you haven't signed up yet and would still like to, you can now do it directly at this link (follow the Subscribe link in the sidebar). We’ll be getting in touch probably early in 2012.

3. A quick advance notice: we will be present in some form (details not yet decided!) at Quadrivium VII, University of Glasgow, 16-17 February 2012. We hope to see you there.

Finally, we wish everyone a very Happy Christmas and New Year Holiday!

Wanted: Medievalists to undertake User Testing for Manuscripts Online

Tags

user testing

We are currently seeking people who are willing to work with us as user testers as we develop our new web service, Manuscripts Online. You will be able to do the testing remotely, at four points during the next 12 months, and your responses will be recorded via an online survey. Working with us will enable you to have direct input into how Manuscript Online evolves. We are particularly interested in obtaining input from anyone who teaches, studies or undertakes research into any aspect of medieval English language, literature and history.

If you are interested in acting as one of our testers, please join our mailing list here (follow the Subscribe link in the sidebar).

More information about the project

Please also feel free to spread the word about this call for testers to colleagues and students!

Download invitation and project info in Word format

Project News

A quick update!

The project now has its own domain at www.manuscriptsonline.org. Until the final website goes live in early 2013, that address will bring you to this site, which will be the hub for all project news and reports.

To be kept up to date with all the news, you can subscribe to the RSS feed here and/or follow us on Twitter at @MedMSSO.

We also have an information page about the project, to explain just what we’re trying to do. Feedback is welcome! (But please bear in mind comments are likely to be moderated and may take a little while to appear on the site.)

Introducing Manuscripts Online

Manuscripts Online will enable users to search an enormous body of online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500.

A single search engine will enable users to undertake sophisticated full-text searching of literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books which are located on websites owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers. Users will be able to search the resources by keyword, but also by specific keyword types, such as person and place name, date and language (eg. Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman), thanks to techniques which we are using called automated entity recognition. Additionally, users will be able to visualise search results using maps of medieval Britain and create their own annotations to the data for public consumption, thereby building a knowledge base around this critical mass of primary source data.

Manuscripts Online (www.manuscriptsonline.org) is a sister site to Connected Histories and will extend the model of data clustering and federated searching which was developed during the earlier project. It will also build upon the lessons which were learnt and capitalise on the methodologies and processes which were developed.

More about Manuscripts Online…