Welcome to Digital Scriptorium!

Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a growing consortium of North American institutions with collections of global premodern manuscripts. DS is dedicated to building an online national union catalog built on Linked Open Data technologies and practices for premodern manuscripts in US collections. 

The addition of current DS Member Institution data is ongoing. Recent data additions to the DS Catalog include contributions from:

• University of Chicago
• University of Pennsylvania
• Free Library of Philadelphia
• Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library
• Boston Public Library
• Williams College
• Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary

This now brings the DS Catalog to nearly 25,000 records representing 42 different institutions/collections. We are also continuing to process records from other member institutions, including manuscripts held at held at Fordham University, the California State Library, Western Michigan University, and Buffalo & Erie County Public Library.

Institutions are represented in the DS Catalog depending upon contribution of their data to DS. If records for a member institution are not yet available, please check back or follow our progress by subscribing to the DS newsletter.

As an organization, DS promotes awareness of and facilitates research related to the material objects of scribal cultures and provides access to hand-written materials produced by these cultures and textual communities. The DS Catalog therefore includes materials focusing on these cultures from the era of the codex. Read this for a more detailed description of DS’s content scope.

Use the DS Catalog to

• Access and research manuscript data across member institutions
• Bookmark results and save searches
• Link to external authorities for richer context and deeper data exploration
• Query the DS Wikibase SPARQL Endpoint for advanced search and discovery within the DS Catalog and beyond

Questions about the new DS Catalog?

Learn more about the project here.

Is your institution interested in joining DS?

Learn more about membership here.

Member benefits include:

• Transformation of your structured manuscript metadata into Linked Open Data
• Representation of your manuscript collections in Wikidata, the world’s largest and freely accessible Knowledge Graph (coming soon)
• Participation in a national community of scholarship and research supporting the study of our shared intellectual heritage through collaboration across institutional and regional boundaries

Stay up to date on DS community activities and opportunities.

Sign up here for the DS newsletter.

Become a Friend of Digital Scriptorium

Friends contribute financially to support our mission to provide cross-institutional digital access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts and enhance access and appreciation of historically significant but often understudied manuscript materials. Your tax-deductible contribution today supports tomorrow’s sustainability of DS’s national union catalog of pre- and early modern manuscripts and ensures open access to member institutions’ data by users around the world. Click here to learn more about becoming a Friend of DS!