Collections

Movement of Manuscripts: Most manuscripts in European collections have been relocated from their original places. This transitory history is crucial as manuscripts often bear marks of their journeys and previous storages, which could span centuries.

Challenges in Provenance and Full Life History:

• Emphasis on understanding and documenting the full life history of manuscripts.

• Contributions from environmental and handling factors are noted, with interdisciplinary collaboration needed to fully contextualize these artefacts.

Perspective on Collections:

• Curators view their collections holistically, valuing information on all items regardless of their specific interest areas.

• There is a divide between believers and non-believers in the value of curatorial work, highlighting the need for broader advocacy and education within the community.

Dispersal and Fragmentation of Collections:

• Collections often get dispersed across multiple locations, complicating the understanding of their history and condition.

• The idea of collections existing in multiple places provides a unique challenge to understanding the full scope of their histories.

Cataloguing and Metadata Standards:

• Cataloguing manuscripts is an intensive task that has been ongoing in some places for over a century.

• Numerous initiatives aimed at standardizing cataloguing practices have generally not succeeded, although tools like TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) are making strides.

Community and Volunteer Engagement:

• The potential of community-driven efforts like those seen with Wikipedia, where volunteers contribute significantly to aggregating and editing information, could be harnessed to improve manuscript cataloguing and metadata standardization.

Challenges with Implementing Standards:

• Difficulties in getting entire communities to adopt uniform standards for data entry, with comparisons made to the adoption challenges faced by the metric system in certain regions.

Importance of Accessible Data and Public Engagement:

• Curators feel a strong responsibility to make their collections accessible and to communicate their value and history to a wider public, ensuring that data associated with collection items is comprehensible and available.

Opportunities for Enhanced Learning and Sharing:

• There is significant potential to learn more about collections through scientific analysis and to share these findings more broadly, enhancing the value of collections as educational resources.