ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2009) — Google “Edward the Confessor” and you’ll get page after page of links to biographies of this 11th-century English king, to Westminster Abbey, which he founded and where he is buried, and to the Magna Carta, which was partly inspired by laws enacted during his 24-year reign.
But a completely digitized manuscript of the oldest surviving Anglo-Norman history of the king does not turn up — at least on the first 20 search pages — even though Cambridge University painstakingly scanned the sumptuously illustrated manuscript in 2003.
That history, “The Life of King Edward the Confessor,” probably written by a Benedictine monk named Matthew Paris sometime between 1250 and 1260, is not alone. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 rare and precious medieval manuscripts have been scanned over the past decade into formats that could be studied over the Internet if only scholars knew they existed and knew where to find them.
“Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book,” said Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA. “Since finding these great projects is so tough, they’re functionally invisible.”
Fisher set out two years ago to remedy the situation. With the assistance of two graduate students in English, a computer developer from UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities and Christopher Baswell, a former UCLA professor of English, Fisher decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.
