A national library has completed a decade-long effort to digitise its oldest archive, putting a manuscript collection spanning 700 years online for anyone to read, free of charge. The project captured 1.2 million pages, from illuminated medieval texts to fragile administrative records that had been too delicate to handle.
Access used to mean a train, a reading room and a pair of white gloves. Now it means a search box. That changes who gets to ask questions of these documents.
- Dr. Miriam Haddad, archivist and book historian, National Library
Conservators photographed each page at high resolution, and a searchable text layer was generated so scholars can query the collection by word rather than leafing through catalogues. Several manuscripts are being seen in full by the public for the first time.
What is now online
The 1.2 million pages include correspondence, maps, legal records and religious texts, the oldest dating to the 14th century. The library says the digital copies also serve as a preservation backup, reducing the need to physically handle originals that degrade with every viewing.
What comes next
The library plans to release the images under an open licence and publish the underlying data so researchers can build tools on top of it. A second phase, covering a further half-million pages, is already being scoped.