Piloting a National Programme for the Digitization of Medieval Manuscripts in Germany

Abstract

An initiative to develop a concerted national programme for the digitization of medieval manuscripts in Germany was launched by five German manuscript centres in January 2013. This new proposal aims at the development of a master plan for the digitization of nearly all surviving medieval manuscripts in Germany and at the establishment of a new funding programme of the DFG (German Research Foundation), the largest research funding organization in Germany.Besides this fundamental financial aspect, other objectives are the diffusion of technical standards and know-how to less experienced cultural heritage institutions and the creation of a nationwide network of competent partners, e.g. in the areas of digitization itself, long-term storage of digital data, the administration of persistent identifiers, and the internet presentation of digital collections. An important role will be played by the German manuscripts portal, Manuscripta Mediaevalia, which is intended as the central hub for both the presentation of digital collections of German manuscripts, but also of the relevant metadata, that is, digital and ideally searchable fulltext versions of scholarly, in-depth manuscript descriptions. Of course, this