From Parchment to the Network: Manuscript Management and Cataloguing

Conservation libraries have the responsibility of preserving documents as long as possible and disseminating them as largely as possible, whereas usually documents are available only to those scholars who can reach reading rooms. To this aim, libraries have first to catalogue manuscripts, facing the problem of their diversity: each manuscript, document or archive has its own features, due to its history. Consequently, catalogues reflect this diversity and even the criteria used for shelf marking are subjective and highly non-standard. Information technology can help librarians both to record ancient documents descriptions and to allow their dissemination. Digitization projects in fact make manuscripts available to anyone through the Web, while original copies can be protected. DSI of the Università degli Studi di Milano is collaborating with Biblioteca Ambrosiana to find solutions to a variety of problems related to management, catalogue and description of these documents. In this paper we present the result of this collaboration: a topographical inventory and the experience of adopting the DTD for manuscripts defined by the EU Project MASTER, to export manuscript descriptions in MANUS, a relational DB distributed in Italy by ICCU and vice versa import in MANUS descriptions originally given in SGML.