Virtual Manuscript Room

The University of Birmingham's Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing is developing the Virtual Manuscript Room

The Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) will bring together digital resources related to manuscript materials (digital images, descriptions and other metadata, transcripts) in an environment which will permit libraries to add images, scholars to add and edit metadata and transcripts online, and users to access material.The centrepiece of the VMR will be full digitized manuscripts from Birmingham's Mingana collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, previously unavailable on the web, with descriptions from the printed catalogue.

Two other groups of content, amounting to over 50,000 digital images of manuscripts, 500 manuscript descriptions and around 1000 pages of transcripts, will be included in the VMR: materials relating to the New Testament and to medieval vernacular texts (Dante, Chaucer, and others).

The Birmingham VMR will integrate with a parallel VMR already under construction at the University of Münster, Germany, with the aim that users may access material seamlessly from either VMR, as if the two were one.This integration will be built on agreed naming systems for resources, and agreed Web 2.0 service protocols for requesting and supplying resources from each server, thus permitting users to draw together (‘mash-up') materials seamlessly as required. The VMR will also be linked through to the online archive catalogue and to the Birmingham University Institutional Repository.

Images of the pages in more than seventy manuscripts are already accessible, and they provide a couple of useful RSS feeds.